Dovekie

Livecode anything!

Every time you add a parameter to code, you're creating an infinite world of possibilities. But it can be hard to explore them. One approach is to choose a few parameters and create an interface of sliders and dropdowns (e.g. dat.gui).

Dovekie aims to be more flexible: you can use expressions to combine time, mouse events, MIDI events, and whatever else you'd like!

At this time, this is a work in progress! Things are rough and will totally change!

Lineage

Dovekie is a JavaScript package that surfaces the livecoding features from the Rust package Murrelet so you can use them in JavaScript.

Publications

ICLC 2025 Alpaca 2023

Setup

The file examples/basic.html should have a working example.

Call this once to initialize:

await wasmInit();
let model = new Dovekie();

// attach a few useful event handlers if you want
model.set_div(div);

// set up the automatic gui if you want
await model.setup_gui(editor_container, {
  schema_hints: SCHEMA_HINTS,
  sketch_name: "basic",
});

Then every frame, you'll want to update and access the parameters!

model.update({ custom_variables: CUSTOM_VARIABLES });

const params = model.params();

Expression language

Functions to modify the global config

When setting up the model, you can use these functions to

model.set_div(div)

Mouse events (mx, my, cx, cy) as well as window info (w, h) are based on this.

model.set_bpm(80)

update the beats per minute to 80.

model.set_beats_per_bar(3)

Sets the number of beats per bar.

Built-in variables

• t (float) ti (int): the current "bar" of music, e.g. increases by 1.0 every bpm / beats_per_bar.
• tease: a shortcut for a value that eases between 0 and 1 every 4 bars.
• f (float) fi (int): the frame

if set_div was called

• w and h the width and height of the provided div
• cx and cy the x and y coordinates within the provided div of the last click location
• mx and my the x and y coordinates within the provided div of the last mouse location

Custom variables

You can add in your own variables! If you send in a dictionary to model.update , it'll update the variable value which can then be used in expressions.

model.update({ audio: 2.1 });

functions

s(x, a, b)

s will scale x (assumed to be between 0 and 1) to be between a and b.

ease(x, freq, [offset])

ease will bounce a variable (like t) between 0 and 1 freq times. The optional offset is useful if you want to have mulitple things with the same frequency but starting at different times.

rn(seed, seed_offset)

uses the floor of seed to create a pseudo-random number. seed offset is conveninent shorthand if you want multiple different random numbers from the same source.

Dev

I usually run npm run dev to watch the javascript/rust and build the bundle, and then I can run python -m http.server 8000 in the folder and go look at examples/basic.html or whatever file.