I did pick up this idea from this on the form, thanks.. I have been thinking about making tasks, threads for sharing and so on. I wanted to make something so that it'd be possible to post a tidal pattern here, and have my server automatically render it as sound. I am super short on sleep at the moment though, so didn't manage to get it working over this weekend.
I think I'll prioritise cranking a few more videos out over the next day or two, and meanwhile will think about an end of week project, suggestions welcome.
It'd be nice to organise feedback for those who'd appreciate that. One problem is we have 300 people signed up, and if everyone actively contributes a (say) 3 minute piece, that'd already be five hours of material! Of course it'd be an optional territory, and only a portion will opt-in.. and as you say the task could be to make a single pattern, rather than a whole piece. But nonetheless, perhaps we should have something set up where we each feed back on a few pieces? Or perhaps just form smaller break-off study groups for people who'd find that helpful? I know @heavy.lifting has been thinking about how we could introduce an art crit approach to this kind of thing. I'm sure this is well charted territory for MOOCs, but it's all quite new to me..
Yeah the MOOCs do it, but it's pretty hard work in my experience. The forum interaction experience on edX for example is pretty poor which is something you could definitely leverage better with discourse/achievements I expect.
An opt-in participation thread for each week might be a good start. Something that already sets you aside from the MOOCs is your active participation. If you were to actually highlight two or three contributions that are "interesting" for some reason (unique applications of functions/some particular feature/or just to highlight common mistakes/optimisations) - that way there's obviously two way engagement which is something I think is really high value.
You won't need to listen to everyone's, just grab a random handful and pull some threads on two or three specific bits that stand out to you.
Anyway, not demanding anything here, just making suggestions - once again, I really appreciate the work you're putting in and the consideration of how you're doing it
Thanks a lot for this, that makes a lot of sense. I haven’t managed to properly participate in the MOOCs I optimistically signed up for in the past, so these insights are great. I’m happy to not be using MOOC software as I’m sure there are a lot of assumptions built into the way they work.
“The main activity of a teacher is to orchestrate learning opportunities, to get students to do and think” - I think this ties in nicely with your ideas/suggestions @cleary and I’ll take that onboard! Perhaps with music though we should be doing, thinking and listening, because I think live coding is about perception as much as it is about action…
No worries, happy to be of assistance - this is stuff that I think on a lot without a lot of opportunity to execute so I'm glad it's of use
That was an interesting read - I've done a few MOOC courses, completed them all and found them really high value (although as noted, they can be massively improved )
But as my wife has mentioned to me on multiple occasions, I don't learn like a lot of other people, so according to that post I'm one of the lucky few that the MOOC fits...
Thanks everyone who made it for the live stream, you can watch on catch up here.
We're quite a bit ahead of the plan already. The mini-notation week was originally going to be a fairly gentle introduction.. I imagined doing one video per week, but we've got most of it covered over three of them already. But please don't worry if you've not got through everything yet. We'll pick up questions on old posts so ask away.
Week two is going to be mainly about effects. SuperDirt has a wide range of fun effects - distortion, reverb and other filters. You can pattern these separately to the sounds they're working on, so there's some mind-bending fun ahead, especially when we start taking a closer look at how different kinds of patterns get combined into one.
Towards the end of the week we'll start looking at a few functions for manipulating the fabric of time, and think about doing some creative tasks.. Onwards!
So I don't know if there's time for this or anything but I think a really neat supplement to Week 1 would be examples of how mininotation maps to the underlying API of pattern building functions. Like {hd*4,sn*3/2} becomes what mess concatenated functions? I'd find this helpful in just connecting the somewhat intuitive sense I have of mininotation with the guts of Tidal & how the Pattern type works.
(As part of my spring cleaning I've merged a couple of separate threads into this single one for thoughts about the course.)
Looking ahead to week 4, I think I'll focus on two related things - continuous patterns, and randomness. This will include shaping or automating effects over time with sine, sawtooth etc waves, and different kinds of random functions. We'll also look at some functions for shuffling, and generally think about what randomness is, and what it does and doesn't give us (beware, I have some opinions on this).
After that it'll be the end of the cycle.. I think I'll then take a week off from releasing videos, although the forum will of course stay open and the materials available long term. That'll give me time to work on the reference text and look into coordinating better with @heavy.lifting and other potential contributors to the course.
I'll ask you all to go through the pay-as-you-feel wall to get access to the next batch of videos etc for the next four weeks, but as before will make no judgment about those who can't afford it for reasons of exchange rate or lack of cash! This course is for all.
So after next week and the rest week, we'll likely kick off the next cycle with focus on making melodies, something I've been having a lot of fun with lately.. Then after that a week on interference patterns, another on 'escaping the grid', maybe another on input and output via MIDI and others, at which point we'll be through the Tidal basics and I'll be open to suggestions of what we do next! It might be that eight weeks in total is enough, lets see..
@yaxu I have one other thought for the sharing/challenge component:
Define hashtags we can use to easily find others content on soundcloud/clyp -
I'd do one like #cycle0 as a generic tag to identify course participants, and #challenge1 or otherwise similarly named to suit the activity.
It might be worth trying to get #tidalcycles used commonly too, you could get a handle on how many people out there are creating with it?
@yaxu thanks a lot for organising this, I'm finding it very useful and fun!
After the basics are covered, one topic I'd like to suggest would be looking at how to actually put it all together, approaches for making live sets, songs etc. I know each artist eventually develops her own style and it's all very personal, but I think it'd be interesting hearing some point of view and learning more about the big picture, live performance strategies etc.
For me personally that has always been the big obstacle with tidal (and livecoding in general): I do some tutorials, learn the language, even manage to write down some nice loop but then I find it really hard to go from there to say a 1h set...
I know it all requires practice and is not something that can be explained in one video, but I thought it could be a nice topic to explore and discuss!
Sorry taken a while to respond to this! I hope the performance talkthrough with @hellocatfood helped a bit towards this. Will talk with @heavy.lifting about how to approach this aspect too, we covered preparing for sets etc in the summerschool we ran in Sheffield last year.
I would say though that preparing a 1h solo live coding set is tricky. I like 30 mins as a sweet spot, 40 mins as a comfortable maximum (with preparation, a good night's sleep etc!). I have done 2 hour+ performances, but generally only in collaboration.. We should set up some networked collaboration as part of this course at some point - it's a great way to get inspiration!
Welcome to a fresh influx of Tidal club members! Let me know if you have any questions or concerns, and if you have problems installing, there's a section for that.. We'll get you sorted!
There's two new lessons up today, in the form of a random function marathon:
I'm behind on doing live streams, so lets fit two in this weekend !
For the first one, I'll attempt tidalclub challenge #2. I'm not 100% sure about the second one - ideas welcome! We can do some q+a during both of them.
I was supposed to come at the summer school last year, but unfortunately I couldn't make it and had to cancel
Yeah that could be fun! I personally would be quite interested in trying out some collaboration, I'm sure there's a lot of potential for fun and learning!
Thanks for all the feedback! I'll leave it open to responses for another day or two before posting a summary. Already it's been really useful.
Here's a first draft of a plan for the next weeks of the course, starting next week. I'm not 100% sure whether I'll be able to spend as much time on it all, because I'm expecting fewer signups/less income for the next two rounds, but it should be OK. In any case some of the weeks look a bit too ambitious, so might end up having to spread them out over more weeks. Thoughts + suggestions welcome !
Week 5 - Tonality
Melodies and chords
Arpeggios
Canons
Week 6 - Control all the things
Controlling supercollider synths
Controlling MIDI
Controlling visuals and other things with OSC
Week 7 - Deeper into functions
Manipulating time
Combining functions
Making shorthands
Week 8 - music production
Review of effects
Longer form composition with “ur” - patterns of patterns
Sending data to a DAW (digital audio workstation)
Working with ‘snippets’
Live streaming
another break!
Week 9 - binary patterns
binary operations
sharing metre and other variables
Week 10, 11, 12 - all the functions
A methodical look at Tidal’s library of pattern transformation functions, trying out everything including the SECRET stuff, no sleep until it’s all covered !
thanks