🧶🧵🧶 zwirn 🧶🧵🧶

zwirn is a live coding language for playing with nested functions of time.

Inspiration

zwirn is an experiment in making the pattern language TidalCycles into a small functional language of it's own. while zwirn's internals are quite different from Tidal's, zwirns design owes almost everything to tidals design by Alex McLean.

the internal representation of signals of time was implemented together (and parallel) with Julian Rohrhuber, in an effort to port tidal to SuperCollider. This can be found in the zwirn-core sublibrary.

the implementation of the compiler is inspired by the excellent Write You a Haskell by Stephen Diehl.

Installing zwirn

tba

Limitations

due to the representation of signals and the way they are queried, there can only be a limited amount of triggers per cycle, if this number is exceeded zwirn fails to find any triggers. Currently the threshold seems to be at 500 triggers per cycle:

while fast 499 $ s "bd" works as expected, fast 500 $ s "bd" is silent. if you would like to increase the amount of trigger per second (not cycle!), increase the cycles per second, for example by running :cps 1.

Documentation

documentation for zwirn is still in progress and available here, feel free to drop me a message if you have any questions.