Pulse

Overview

Pulse is an audiovisual performance using TidalCycles and Hydra. TidalCycles is a live coding environment designed for musical improvisation and composition, while Hydra is a live-codeable video synth and coding environment that runs directly in the browser.

The piece is pre-written in Tidal language and JavaScript, then performed through live manipulation and execution of the code. It moves through different emotional phases and uses sound and line-based visuals as a metaphor for life’s quietness, pain, struggle, strength, beauty, and blossom.

Technical

• TidalCycles
• Hydra
• Live coding
• Browser-based visual synthesis

Inspiration

The project was inspired by Lifeline-Zeraphym and Sturm I - Fear. The former uses music and heartbeat sound to create an atmosphere that feels like a sad but hopeful story, while the latter combines rapid piano with interesting sound effects and a repeating progressive melody.

Process

I started by making random beats. I did not expect to make the piece musical, partly because I did not intend to write a traditional melody and partly because I thought it would be difficult without a thorough music theory background. I wrote a short melody of four or six notes as practice, and it began to sound good after I added more notes and doubled it.

I also did not expect to use piano because it was not my usual taste and because the SuperPiano synth did not sound good at first. However, after writing the melody and chords, I realized that using other synthesizers changed the pitch relationship, so I kept SuperPiano to avoid rebuilding the chords. When the gain was set to a certain value, it unexpectedly sounded right.

That became the foundation of the composition style. I added a heartbeat-like beat, then added a simulated electrocardiogram-machine sound. I wanted the piece to avoid sounding happy. One chord originally felt too joyful, and the final result became at least less happy than that.

For the visuals, Hydra put heavy stress on my computer and frequently stopped functioning. I spent less time on the visual system than the sound, but I still achieved the core idea of transforming a single line. I would like to explore this kind of simple and minimal visual language more in future work.