This is my first post here, and it is about something I made. I am not used to taking part in communities like this one, so bear with me if I get the manners wrong.
I have known about TidalCycles and Strudel for a while. Then my recent work with AI led me to a question I think many people have asked themselves: what if I used Claude Code to control Strudel? So I put the two together and called it Moontide. I started in late September and made it public a few days ago.
Along the way I found other projects doing something similar: the Tidal MCP server discussed here last November, and StrudelMASS, a NIME 2026 paper that takes the idea somewhere quite different. I read that thread before posting, and I understand AI is not welcome to everyone here. There is surely a lot happening in this area that I have missed.
What I think is a little different about Moontide: it is easy to install, with few dependencies. Once it is set up, asking Claude for music (or saying "start Moontide") opens a web page with a Strudel editor, and Claude writes the code there. The code stays on screen and you can edit it. Around it there are several views, a bit like different kinds of (very crude) DAW put together: a timeline, a mixer, the parts of a piece, a jam view, and a few more. Every version that played is kept, and a right-click sends Claude a request with the context of what you clicked on: on the timeline, the moment under the pointer and the version that was playing; in the mixer, the control.
It also plays MIDI instruments, and that is a part I care about. You can ask Claude to read the documentation of your hardware (a page of the manual, the sound list) and then to control it, in part. Today it chooses sounds by their names, the kind of device and its engine, and it moves some of the controls the manual lists, like a filter cutoff. I hope a future version can go further into how the sound is shaped: oscillators, envelopes. I have used it with a Roland SC-55, a Jupiter-Xm, a Moog Mother-32 and a Subharmonicon, and with an MT-32 emulator.
I thought I was building a very down-to-earth tool, for jamming and for looking for musical ideas. The way I use it myself turned out a bit unexpected. I start very practically: this bass is too loud, this is too thin. Then I begin to give intentions, and for that I tell stories. "We are coming out of the sewers into a place in nature we did not know." Images, not parameters. So I use it for illustration, and it works well with an MT-32, an SC-55 or the Strudel samples; it takes me somewhere close to "dungeon synth". But I also use it to explore directions, to bring in a little music theory, to spice up a track, or to start from a simple beat and build on top of it, as an aid or a curiosity for composing.
It is a personal project, tested on macOS and on a Debian machine, with known bugs, and probably some unknown ones. It stands on Strudel, which it loads at run time. Thank you to the people who make it. I would be glad to know what you think.