During my residency period, I’m rewriting “Texture”, the visual front-end for Tidal I started making way back in the closing moments of my PhD. The first step is to re-implement Texture in Haskell — before it was written in C, and spat out code that was then piped into the Haskell interpreter, which was a bit nuts. I’m taking a bricolage approach so don’t have a clear plan, but have a rudimentary interface starting to work:
As before, the idea is that values are applied to the closest function with a compatible type signature. I’ve still had to ‘reimplement’ the Haskell type system in itself to some extent. While I could get Haskell to tell me whether a value could be type-compatible with a function, it seems that this is not enough. This is because in practice, it is very likely that things will be type compatible, and the real constraints come with the presence of type class instances. Or something like that.
My next step is where the real point of this rewriting exercise comes in – visualisation of patterns as they are passed through a tree of transformations. I’m not sure exactly how this is going to look, but because this is all about visualising higher order functions of time and not streams of data, it’s going to be something quite a bit different from dataflow; it’ll be able to include past and future values in the visualisation without any buffering.
The (currently useless) code is available here, under the GPLv3 license.
