Kāl Performance Station

Kāl Performance Station is a professional, performance-oriented environment built on top of the incredible Strudel project, which itself is a JavaScript port of the popular TidalCycles live coding environment.

Kāl aims to provide a robust, focused, and aesthetically immersive live performance tool. It takes the deeply expressive pattern-generation engine from Strudel and wraps it in a modern, dark-themed, highly-responsive digital audio workstation (DAW) and VJing interface.

Key Features

• Performance (Zen) Mode: A completely distraction-free full-screen mode with transparent text editors designed specifically for live performances and projections.
• Visualizer Suite: A suite of high-performance WebAudio visualizers (Waveform, Ridge/Waterfall, Circle, Heatmap) that react directly to the master audio output in real time.
• Stage Management: Stages (projects) can be created, saved, and managed locally using an offline-first architecture powered by IndexedDB.
• Portable .kals Format: An integrated import/export system for creating portable project packages. Stages can be zipped into .kals files complete with their code, history, and metadata.
• History Tracking: Automatic snapshotting of your code whenever you play or evaluate, allowing you to instantly rollback your changes and browse your coding history.
• Custom Kāl Aesthetic: A beautiful gold-and-black dark theme, featuring smooth micro-animations and typography designed for extended live coding sessions.

Acknowledgements

Kāl Performance Station stands on the shoulders of giants. We would like to extend our deepest gratitude to:

• The Strudel Project and its maintainers for creating an incredible JavaScript live coding engine.
• The TidalCycles community for pioneering expressive algorithmic composition.

Running Locally

After cloning the project, you can run the REPL locally:

1. Install Node.js 18 or newer
2. Install pnpm
3. Install dependencies by running the following command:

   pnpm i

4. Run the development server:

   pnpm dev

Using Strudel / Kāl Engine

This project contains many packages, which are available on npm. Read more about how to use these in your own project here.

License

This project is distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3. As such, code can only be shared within free/open source projects under the same license -- see the license for details.

Licensing info for the default sound banks can be found over on the dough-samples repository.