Elastic Tempo Flux

I just published a new tutorial video on how to achieve continuous, elastic tempo changes in TidalCycles.

The video covers techniques with two different functions: nudge and spaceOut.

nudge

You can use nudge to move the timing of events into the future. Here, we schedule each of the four cp samples with future times of 0, 0.7, 0.2, and 0.4 seconds, respectively:

d1 $ sound "cp*4" # nudge "0 0.7 0.2 0.4"

The above example isn’t very interesting. However, when you apply a sine function to nudge, you can make time appear to stretch in a smooth way:

d1 $ sound "cp*4" # nudge (slow 8 $ sine)

Different pattern densities, scaling, and sine speeds interact with each other to create different results:

d1 $ sound "cp*8" # nudge (range 0 2 $ slow 16 $ sine)

spaceOut

The spaceOut function lets you specify a list of cycle speed multipliers, and then plays the pattern exactly once at each speed:

d1 $ spaceOut [1, 0.5, 1.33, 0.1, 2] $ sound "cp*4 cp*2"

The above code will play the cp*4 cp*2 pattern at 1, then 0.5, 1.33, 0.1, and 2 times the normal cycle speed.

Where spaceOut gets a little more interesting is when you use Haskell’s list syntax to build longer lists of linear (or non-linear) values. Consider this spaceOut pattern that plays at speeds ranging from 1 to 3, incrementing by 0.1:

d1 $ spaceOut [1,1.1..3] $ sound "cp*4"

The above pattern has 30 different speeds (!) but with very little code.

You can achieve speed “oscillations” that resemble a triangle wave by adding two lists together with the ++ operator:

d1 $ spaceOut ([0.1,0.2..3] ++ [3,2.9..0.1]) $ sound "cp*4"

You can use many different Haskell features to build lists. Here is a different method that constructs lists of fractional values using map:

d1 $ spaceOut (map (1/) [1,1.5..10]) $ sound "cp*4"