🧶🧵🧶 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

Currently, the easiest way to play with zwirn is through the small terminal UI zwirnmill, which comes with the sound engine doux bundled. You can grab a release for your operating system here.

Compiling from Source

To compile zwirnmill or zwirnzi with Doux as the sound engine, you will need both Haskell and Rust installed. Then, clone the following repositories:

git clone https://codeberg.org/uzu/zwirn/
git clone https://codeberg.org/polymorphicengine/haskell-doux

Now we will compile doux-ffi:

cd haskell-doux/doux-ffi
cargo build --release

Then you will have to edit the paths in zwirn/cabal.project.local to point to your haskell-doux folder. Now we are ready to install zwirnzi or zwirnmill:

cd zwirn
cabal install zwirnzi
cabal install zwirnmill

If you want to use zwirnzi with SuperCollider / SuperDirt instead, the installation is simpler:

git clone https://codeberg.org/uzu/zwirn/
cd zwirn
cabal install zwirnzi --flags +superdirt