Xi

Xi is a musical pattern language inspired in Tidal and SuperCollider for building higher-level musical constructs easily. It is implemented on the Ruby programming language and uses SuperCollider as a backend.

Xi is only a patterns library, but can talk to SuperCollider synths or MIDI devices.

NOTE: Be advised that this project is in very early alpha stages. There are a multiple known bugs, missing features, documentation and tests.

Example

melody = [0,3,6,7,8]
scale = [Scale.iwato, Scale.jiao]

fm.set degree: melody.p(1/2,1/8,1/8,1/8,1/16,1/8,1/8).seq(2),
       gate: :degree,
       detune: [0.1, 0.4, 0.4],
       sustain: [1,2,3,10],
       accelerate: [0.5, 0, 0.1],
       octave: [3,4,5,6].p(1/3),
       scale: scale.p(1/2),
       amp: P.new { |y| y << rand * 0.2 + 0.8 }.p(1/2)

kick.set freq: s("xi.x .ix. | xi.x xx.x", 70, 200), amp: 0.8, gate: :freq

clap.set n: s("..x. xyz. .x.. .xyx", 60, 61, 60).p.slow(2),
         gate: :n,
         amp: 0.35,
         pan: P.sin(16, 2) * 0.6,
         sustain: 0.25

Installation

Quickstart

You will need Ruby 2.4+ installed on your system. Check by running ruby -v. To install Xi you must install the core libraries and REPL, and then one or more backends.

$ gem install xi-lang

Available backends:

xi-midi: MIDI devices support
xi-superdirt: SuperDirt backend

For example:

$ gem install xi-lang xi-superdirt

Then run Xi REPL with:

$ xi

There is a configuration file that is written automatically for you when run for the first time at ~/.config/xi/init.rb. You can add require lines and define all the function helpers you want.

Repository

Becase Xi is still in alpha stage, you might want to clone the repository using Git instead:

$ git clone https://github.com/xi-livecode/xi

After that, change into the new directory and install gem dependencies with Bundler. If you don't have Bundler installed, run gem install bundler first. Then:

$ cd xi
$ bundle install
$ rake install

You're done! Fire up the REPL using xi.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bundle to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

You can also try things on the REPL without installing the gem on your machine by doing bundle exec bin/xi.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/xi-livecode/xi. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

License

See LICENSE