Short answer: Jordan Metzner says Strudel is a JavaScript live coding library for music composition he found via TikTok; its code is easy to read and edit, LLMs write it well, and its community has remade songs like Charli XCX's 360.
Watch this answer from Episode 11 (starts at 2:03) · Episode 11 notes and transcript
From Episode 11: Coding the Beat: Strudel, Claude Dashboards & OpenAI’s $1B Play, starting at 2:03.
Jordan Metzner [2:02]: Yes. So busy week. I was scrolling and perusing through TikTok, one of my favorite pastimes, and I found some TikTokers making music using code. And what they were using was a library called Strudel, which is a JavaScript library for developing music, and I'd never heard of it before. So I took a quick screenshot of what they were working on, and then started to explore it a little bit. And Strudel is this library built off of another library that is essentially meant for music composition. Cool thing about Strudel, it's got a really easy language to be able to read. It's pretty editable. And as you know, LLMs are great at writing code. So, it's a live coding platform for music and allows you to make edits in real time and do a bunch of other stuff. It has a pretty cool online community. The community has done all different cool things. So I think before I show my demo, let me just show this one. So this is some people using Strudel to make a Charli XCX song, a remix cover of the song 360. You can you know, it might be hard to see here, but, if you look in here
Sam Nadler [3:09]: Through, like, kinda how this works, because, like, a lot of the secret sauce is is right here at the top.
Jordan Metzner [3:15]: Yeah. So, I mean, this looks like, almost any other programming language, let, like, lead synth, arrange and, here's the arrangement. So it's a three in one arrangement, and it's e three to b three with c four, and then, kind of runs through this and then it runs through four times. Starts with like a VOC sample up here at the beginning, and the note is a sawtooth, and then, it kinda goes down into each section. Here's the bass, etcetera. If I just press play here, you should be able to hear it. Hopefully, we can sync it all up in post, but should sound like Charli XCX. Let's see how this goes. Alright. So what you can see here is, like, it's, like, running through this three, four times, then it hits this one, then it runs through it again. Right? So you can actually see it happening in real time, and I think I did this like kind of as an example, but like, if we just changed, the entire song or at least the intro to be e three instead of these different notes like e three to as f three, etcetera. Yeah. I think, hopefully, this should work. What we'll be able to see is that, like, the song should come out totally flat.
Jordan Metzner [4:34]: I mean, we can keep those e fours in here, but it's just one note. And so if that plays, let's see if this works. So there you go. And so you can kinda see how that works a little And so I had never really heard of it. I guess maybe it's starting to take some ways online, but I decided to take this and take it up a notch, and maybe I can show you what I built.
Sam Nadler [5:03]: Yeah. So yeah. How did this inspire what you decided to build next?
