Ambient-X-808 is a piece that is performed through live coding

This piece is my first dive into using Tidal Cycles in conjunction with SuperCollider and the “SuperDirt” quark to perform live coding. I decided to experiment with live coding in the Electronic Ensemble course I teach at Georgia Southern. We began by using Estuary and explored collaborative live coding using Troop. For my own work, I found the constraints of Estuary to be too limiting, so I decided to use Tidal Cycles with SuperCollider (and SuperDirt) directly. Being very familiar with SuperCollider, I was pretty comfortable understanding what was happening.

The music syntax of Tidal Cycles and its focus on circular time is fascinating. I was quickly inspired to begin making music without necessarily having mastered the total of the Tidal Cycles options and certainly not being very familiar at all with the Haskell language that it uses.

I thought Tidal Cycles would lend itself pretty well to creating a long form ambient work, which I would be able to program locally on the Channel Noise electronic music concerts that I put on. Somehow, I got distracted from that one idea and decided that it would be good to explore the introduction of a beat driven approach. Here I draw on my long-standing love of hip hop. I sampled from a few sources: Beastie Boys (Shake your rump), Clipse (What happened to that boy), Mac Miller (Self care). These samples along with some other 808 drums are used to create a second section that follows the ambient introduction. Hence the title Ambient X 808.

The code for this piece can be found here: https://github.com/timebent/livecoding_CN_Fall2022.git

Here is a take that I made while staying in New York City in the New Yorker hotel on a floor high above the ground.