About

Hacking the Beats is a place to watch music being made by code, and to play with it. Every song here is a short program. It runs in your browser, and what you hear is what the code on screen is doing at that moment.

What you are looking at

The stage shows a song's code. Each note lights up as it plays, and the patterns draw themselves under the lines that make them. Nothing is a recording: the sound is generated as the code runs, so changing the code changes the music.

The songs are written in Strudel, a language for live-coding music in JavaScript. Anything you can play on strudel.cc can be played here.

What you can do

Anyone can press play on the featured beat and watch it work. The rest needs an account, which is free and takes one click with Google:

• Mix. Two decks play two songs at once, kept in time with each other, with a crossfader between them.
• Turn the knobs. Every slider() in a song becomes a knob on the deck and a slider in the code.
• Work the channels. Each labelled pattern is a channel with a level, a meter, mute and solo.
• Play the pads. Echo, filter drop, reverb wash, half-time, stutter and no drums, for as long as you hold them.
• Edit the code. Press Edit, change anything, and press Ctrl+Enter. The music carries on with your change.
• Keep your own songs. Your version is saved to your account; the original is never changed. You can share one of your songs by link, and anyone with the link can listen.
• Record. Capture the mix as a WAV file.
• Plug in a controller. Any knob, fader, pad or button can be bound to a MIDI controller.

The beats

• Speak and Spell 2 136 bpm

Who runs it

Hacking the Beats is owned and operated by Built By Signal LLC, a venture-building company that works under the name SIGNAL: builtbysignal.com.

Built on Strudel

The music engine is Strudel, the JavaScript port of TidalCycles, © Strudel contributors, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3. Its source is at codeberg.org/uzu/strudel.

This site's own code is © Built By Signal LLC. It is free software under the same licence and comes with no warranty. You can download the source of this version (licence). The archive holds everything needed to rebuild the site, including the script that bundles the unmodified Strudel packages.

Songs and sounds

Each song is credited in its own code. Songs credited to other artists are their work, transcribed or arranged here, and stay theirs.

No sounds are stored on this site. Samples are fetched as a song plays from the public packs it names, which belong to their authors: Strudel's default drum machines, Dirt-Samples and soundfonts, and packs such as algorave-dave/samples, eddyflux/crate, switchangel/beginningtrance and kyrsive/ily2-sounds. Spoken words come from Shabda.

Contact

If something here is yours and you would like it credited differently or taken down, or you have a question, write to hello@hackthebeats.com.