Verso

verso is a grid-based livecoding workstation for music production and performance. It is language-agnostic and will support any live-coding language - so long as it provides a plugin. Currently, only tidalcycles is available and in very early development.

This tool exists out of a personal frustration with text as a medium for delivering musical performance. <opinion> Code is a fantastic tool for composing and sequencing music, but its tooling (aimed at software development) falls short for live performance if compared to basically any other medium </opinion>. Live music typically requires operations like “modulating”, “playing slightly more softly” or “skipping to an entirely different segment of a song”. These are so fundamental we don’t even think about them, but become surprisingly hard to do when your medium is text.

Instead, verso takes inspiration from live performance tools such as Ableton and tries to bridge that gap, combining the power and extensibility of code with the usability of a DAW. It doesn’t try to be a DAW, though - these are huge software pieces far beyond the scope of verso - it’s a performance and composition tool, nothing more.

Verso is built using tauri and vite. This choice of stack is motivated by speed and development experience. Tauri and vite work together very well to provide an extremely fast feedback cycle. Tauri is based on rust, making it a very robust (and brutally faster) alternative to Electron.