Live coding has one dirty secret: it chains you to the keyboard. You want to walk out front, pick up the steel, actually play — but the loop needs freezing and the visualizer needs swapping, and both of those live behind a laptop that’s now ten feet away.
tether is the fix. It’s a little PWA that turns your phone into a wireless remote for the qualia rig. No audio ever crosses the wire — just tiny control messages — so you can drive the whole set from your pocket while your hands do something better.
pairing (once)
Open /lab/tether, install it, and you get a fullscreen app with a cyan ⌁ icon. Then pair: in qualia, hit ⌁ sync → leader and it throws up a private QR. Scan it. That’s the whole handshake.
Do it once. After that the installed app relaunches straight into the room — no QR, no fiddling. Phone comes out of your pocket already connected.
one action map, three ways in
Here’s the part I’m smug about. tether doesn’t have its own logic. Every pad, slider, and drum pad dispatches through the same action map as my DOIO macro-pad keystrokes and my MIDI controller. Three input paths, one behavior, zero drift. Rebind “freeze” once and all three follow.
The surface splits into tabs:
- rig — freeze/grab, drives, strip toggles, gain sliders
- loop — looper transport + grab; one rec button that cycles three states
- seq — strudel/seq transport, tempo slider, live drum pads you tap to sound a voice, plus undo/redo/clear
- quale — switch quale/phase, auto-cycle toggles, the set-clock readout, camera, blackout
So the whole rig — audio, looper, sequencer, visuals — is reachable from across the stage.
built for a stage, not a demo
Two things separate this from a toy web remote.
First: it’s a control surface, not an audio pipe. Only control messages ride a Cloudflare relay, ingress is allowlisted, rate-limited per phone, and never eval’d. Your phone can’t stream sound or run arbitrary code into the rig — it can only ask for actions that already exist.
Second: it survives the venue. There’s a ⏻ “pocket lock” so a stray thigh can’t fire a blackout mid-song — tap to deactivate, press-and-hold ~0.4s to re-arm. A screen wake-lock keeps the phone awake through a long ambient stretch. And because venue wifi is reliably garbage, sends are buffered and it auto-reconnects when the network flaps.
None of that is glamorous. All of it is why I trust it live.
why bother
The best moments happen away from the laptop. tether is the difference between “person hunched over a keyboard” and “playing steel out front while the loop freezes on cue” — same rig, hands free.
→ the qualia instrument → what qualia actually is → tether lives here → letting the audience in, too