MAX/MSP

[Mark Bassett]

Does anyone have any experience with MAX/MSP?

[Kurt]

Nope, but it looks cool, might get the trial download and have a play with it myself!

http://www.cycling74.com/products/maxmsp

[Mark Bassett]

Yeah I'm just getting stuck into it, it's very, very powerful.

[jkhuri44]

great program, been meaning to get into it...but i fail! hahha

the cycling 74 plugz are very exciting, i highly recommend the demo, its awesome fun., very unique effects, specttral seperation, freq dependant delay, wierd ass distortion...good fun for wierd sound design


BUT, besides its audio awesomeness, i was explainin to a friend today how to go about setting up interactive stuff using MAX. He wants to set up a Flash interactive program, which recieves information from external world, and pumps information back out the external world....and MAX is perfect to connect internally via the OS these different programs, and then using an ethernet connected box, like "Teleo" (link below)

http://www.makingthings.com/teleo/teleo.htm

you can do some insane interactive stuff using regular computers...y'all DIY heads would dig this stuff....

[Howard Jones]

http://www.makingthings.com/teleo/products/overview.htm

"Teleo products are no longer being manufactured - this site serves only as a reference and support for existing Teleo owners.

To learn more about Teleo products, access detailed documentation about each of the Teleo components, or our free downloadable Teleo software, please explore the menu items to your left."

[Guest]

I haven't used max my self but I've worked with a number of sound designers who run Max. Some have done some amazing stuff sampling vision from live feeds and cameras to trigger filters that effect sounds, process it and play it back in big surround sound events. They've mainly been contemporary dance collaborative pieces.

However I also did a gig where the designer used a mic in the middle of the room with a speaker in each of the four corners, the volume of the speakers was triggered by a camera that sampled the vision from the middle of the room. So when a person entered the room the speakers came on and volume was increased and mic gain was increased until it created a feed back loop. That loop when it hit a certain volume then triggered filters that affected the sound and dispersed it around the room. Funky concept, reality however was a room that made people flee as soon as the feed back started so they were already long gone by the time the filters kicked in. Baby sitting that was a long day.

[Howard Jones]

Ah, Tony, the things we do for art....

[wez]

i used MAX extensively back at uni. it was still being developed back then, interesting to see that it's been bought by Cycling 74. if i recall correctly, it was developed by a French experimental music group.

anyway, it took me ages to get the hang of it... but when i did it was amazing really. you're pretty much limited only by what you can think up. i ended up writing a chaotic music engine where you would input a single note, and every single parameter (pitch, velocity, aftertouch etc) would effect what would happen next. so you could play one note at a velocity of 100, then play the same note with a velocity of 101, and get a completely different result. the idea of course being that it would amplify every variable, and then send everything off in different directions for further processing. some of the music that resulted was incredible.

i was really immersed in chaos theory back then. now i'm just immersed in chaos.

[wez]

btw it only did MIDI back then

[Sheer Noise]

I used MAX at Uni '96-'98 but could never get my head around it properly... I'm still struggling with environments in Logic... go figure... at least my ears are ok, even if my brain is dead!

D

[jkhuri44]

Teleo products are no longer being manufactured - this site serves only as a reference and support for existing Teleo owners.

thats what you get when you do a google search like me and dont read everything :(

haha!

[jon.l.hunter]

yeah I looked into it
I built basically an autonomous a/v surround sound audio patch
for a gallery installation - it was a really huge patch

but I found that although not as powerfull or as indepth I could build
what I needed to build quicker and simpler in reaktor running with a logic environment

with reaktor the only thing you got to remember is within each instrument you build there are a limited
number of modules/macros you can have so for really complex patches you have to fugure
out how to split the proccessing across a few instruments
hopefully they have fixed this in the current version

I believe Robin Fox uses MAX to perform with
- he does these pieces for electronic sound and lasers

Wade Marynowsky has used MAX to build interesting things
such as an autonomous player piano
see here:
http://www.artspace.org.au/gallery/gall ... n.php?e=67


Jon

[wez]

i was at uni with rob fox, he is one very seriously clever and cool experimental music dude. where guys like me struggled a bit with stuff like MAX, guys like rob were all over it. for all i know he probably writes all his own code now... MAX is probably a bit last century these days;-)

any other ex-Latrobe music guys on here? things like MAX (and rob fox for that matter) were kind of what the LTU music dept was all about.

[JulienG]

yeah I looked into it
I built basically an autonomous a/v surround sound audio patch
for a gallery installation - it was a really huge patch

Hey! We had something like that going on 12 years ago, with a MacIICI and a lot of hacked up components, was very cool when it worked, almost impossible to debug when it didn't. IIRC it was 16 channel output.

I also have a friend here in Melbourne who has been employed to work on Max/MSP itself (ie, the software, not to create patches for it).

[tall_phill]

For the budget conscious there is pd. pure data. Created by Miller Puckette who was involved in the development of Max at IRCAM before it went to Cycling 74.

What it looses in user friendliness, it makes up for by virtue of being free. Previously, it also had the advantage of working in windows, but Max does that now.

I visited IRCAM recently and was very disappointed to find out they are only open to guests a few months of the year.

http://puredata.org/

[JulienG]

For the budget conscious there is pd. pure data.

csound is also a potential solution for anything which doesn't really need a ui.