Uzu History

Hello! I’m researching live coding history, communities, and social/political contexts. Could anyone point me to documentation about the origins and early development of the Uzu languages (who started them, when/where, and early references)? Thanks!

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That’s maybe too obvious, but you could look into @yaxu ‘s PhD thesis: https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/6611/1/COMP_thesis_McLean_2011.pdf

Thanks, I know it. Maybe I didn’t explain myself well, when did the name Uzu appear and started being used? What does it mean? How did communities grow around it? Any documentation on that?

There is also the iclc 2023 conference proceeding by Alex McLean and Felix Roos “Strudel: Live Coding Patterns on the Web“ which has a bit of history on the development from Tidal to Strudel.

The name uzu came after having tidal and strudel (and other related languages), this toot seems to be its christening: TOPLAP Social

On the technical side of strudel history, there is @froos ‘s garden entry 🌱 the superdough puzzle which goes into detail how to convince a browser to make the sounds you want to hear.

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Thank you! This is super useful!

Ah, sorry for the misunderstanding! It seemed a bit weird that you of all people would be asking “where does Tidal come from“ :sweat_smile:

I think the source is this discussion on the Discord (@froos was the culprit if so)

Yes I think I initially suggested ‘uzumaki’ (well worth an image search), froos suggested shortening it.

you did, almost a year ago (on 17th feb 2025):

grafik

with a reference to the manga of the same name.

I always start my uzu lang workshops with a tiny history lesson based on this presentation https://youtu.be/jLHzKUQKLPY?si=2AbDfBt6uoqGOrnh by Bernard Bel. Some very nice charts and graphs in there.

that moment when the usual form of communication has changed and I'm frantically trying to understand what's happening?

The announcement about the family name “Uzu” was made in April 2025: Uzulangs

A lot of people joined the discord to learn about strudel last year (myself included).

Following the announcement of the IPO, 3rd party age verifications and problems connected with these in the past few weeks, people are looking for alternatives to discord. yaxu reactivated and redirected the url of the tidal cycles club (?) to this uzu forum, in order to be a place where people can discuss tidal, strudel and all other uzulangs.

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