Livecoding has always had an odd relationship with accessibility. The performances are genuinely compelling — a person on stage writing and rewriting code in real time while a room dances to whatever pattern just changed — but getting to the point of trying it yourself has historically meant installing SuperCollider, or TidalCycles plus a Haskell toolchain, or Sonic Pi, before you’ve made a single sound. Strudel removes that step entirely.
Watch: Strudel — Live Coding Music in the Browser (YouTube)
What it actually is
Strudel is a browser-based port of TidalCycles’ pattern language to JavaScript, originally started by Alex McLean and Felix Roos in 2022. Open the site, start typing, and it makes sound immediately — no account, no install, no prior JavaScript or Tidal knowledge required. The core idea carried over from Tidal is patterns: you describe musical behavior as a repeating structure over fixed time, then transform it with small functions, layering in controlled randomness where you want it.
The interface doubles as its own visualizer — as a pattern plays, the code highlights in sync with the notes and time divisions currently sounding, with a piano roll and oscilloscope view alongside it. For anyone learning, watching the code and the sound line up in real time does more to explain what’s happening than documentation would.
It’s had a substantial update as recently as June 2026, adding four audio engines, seven visualizers, MIDI keyboard input, and a standalone Electron desktop app for people who want it running outside a browser tab. And if the built-in synth engine isn’t enough, Strudel can route out to SuperCollider or Sonic Pi over OSC once you’re ready for more control than a browser can reasonably give you.
Why it matters beyond convenience
The algorave scene — dance events where the music and visuals are generated live from code on stage — has stayed a fairly small, technically-gated community for most of its history, partly because the on-ramp was steep. A tool that makes the first five minutes free of setup friction changes who shows up to try it. Livecoding communities have historically drawn a lot of their growth from workshops and classrooms for exactly this reason, and a genuinely zero-install option removes the single biggest practical obstacle those sessions run into.
If you want to see it live
Algorave events are running throughout 2026 in cities including London, Ghent, Lyon, and Sheffield, with the Sheffield date landing July 30 — check algorave.com for a current listing before making plans, since dates shift.