Latest Articles @ Cycling74

I spent 4 days in Pittsburgh in early June attending the 2009 NIME conference at Carnegie Mellon University. NIME is a conference devoted entirely to new interfaces and devices for the performance of musical ideas. The conference consisted of three days of paper talks, poster sessions, demos, and performances. There was also a well-curated gallery show with a number of impressive interactive sound installations. In addition to all the talks and posters happening on campus, a number of us gathered for nightly pitchers of Yuengling and pizza at the local watering hole, the Panther Hollow Inn. I will try to summarize here what I thought were some of the highlights of NIME 2009.

I recently wrote a couple of tutorials for the Cycling '74 website on a subject that's close to my heart - generating and organizing variety when working with Max (I'll bet that you just thought they were about making LFOs and working with the new Max 5 timing features, didn't you?).

Many of us are invited to perform in unique circumstances – it’s a part of the Digital Media life. Recently, we’ve been featuring some interesting examples of Max-based work, including Andrew Benson’s work with M.I.A. and Dana Karwas’ installations. So when I was asked to play with an electronic music All-Star Band, I couldn’t help but document the experience.

Effective immediately, Cycling ’74 will discontinue sales of prebuilt Max-based audio plug-in packages. This includes Pluggo, Mode, Hipno, and UpMix. We will still continue to support current users as best we can, but there will be no further development on either the plug-in packages or their supporting technology.

On the afternoon of April 3rd, I received an email from M.I.A.'s manager asking if I'd be interested in working with them on a one-off show on the mainstage at Coachella that would feature live video processing, 2 DJs, a real Lighting Director, and glowing EL-wire wardrobe by Janet Cooke Hansen (www.enlighted.com, Daft Punk, etc.) for Maya and the dancers. It was a crazy proposition - I drop everything, cancel classes, take vacation time from work right before Expo '74, and put together a full performance system in like 10 days based on a proof-of-concept patch I had only recently posted on the Jitter forum. So I said yes, of course!

Here is the way I think about it. Cycling '74 is a software company. Developing software is our substantive contribution to mankind. We are not professional conference-givers. We are not O'Reilly. I was not born to give a smashing keynote address.

In the last installment of the Video Processing System we left off with the beginnings of a basic live effects chain with basic compositing, blur, and color effects. Now that we've spent time building some basic interface wrappers for the jit.gl.slab object, it's time to start diving a little deeper. In this installment, we'll be working on some more advanced ninja tricks - creating the beginnings of a control/preset structure with assignable LFOs, and building a GPU-based video delay effect. These two parts will bring our system to a much more usable level, and allow for much more complex and interesting results. Ironically, most of what we are really doing in this installment is just an extension of bread-and-butter Max message passing stuff.

K-Bow

Keith McMillen Instruments recently impressed all of us at NAMM with demonstrations of a new pair of string performance devices, the K-Bow and StringPort, both of which include some very rich software applications written in MaxMSP. The K-Bow, a bluetooth-based wireless gestural controller integrated into a violin bow, has just started shipping so we thought it would be a good time to catch up with Keith and find out more about the project. I met Keith at his studio in Berkeley, CA, home base for Keith McMillen Instruments and the BEAM Foundation. When I arrived, Keith was looking over prototype boards for a new violin pickup with Joel Davel, who also designed the boards for the K-Bow. Once they wrapped up their discussion, Keith sat down and gave me a thorough tour through the technology and ideas behind K-Bow, with Max programmers Barry Threw and Nick Bonardi contributing details about their involvement in the project.

In our last article, we began to create our processing system by putting the essential structure in place and adding our input handling stage. In this installment we are going to be adding a gaussian blur and color tweaking controls to our patch.

In this, the final episode of our guitar processing extravaganza, we are going to step away from making effects and focus on performance support. For a system as complicated as this, performance support means two things: patch storage and realtime control. Thus, we will learn to create a preset system and manipulate the various on-screen controls with an inexpensive MIDI footpedal system.

Introduction

At this point, we have a pretty useful guitar processing "rack", but it could use a little spice. This spice will come from two additional processors: a looping delay unit, and a basic reverb system. Also, to help keep the output useful, we will drop a limiter on the back end of the entire rig.

I recently attended Winter NAMM 2009 in Anaheim,CA, where Cycling '74 was sharing booth space with our friends at Ableton. I arrived on Friday afternoon, well after we had released our product announcement for Max for Live, and was impressed by the volume of booth traffic we were getting. Ableton had, of course, also announced their new Akai controller and Live 8 in addition to Max for Live, so there was a great deal of buzz surrounding our area of the show.

This article provides a brief tour of the features we've added to Max for creating Live devices. If you're familiar with our old plug-in development objects, we hope you'll notice the major improvements we've made. If you're new to creating Max content for audio and MIDI processing, we hope this tour will give you a flavor of the tools that will be at your disposal when Max for Live is released later this year.

Please note, the information presented here is preliminary and subject to change.

Nine years ago, Robert Henke told me about the edit button.

Robert was in Anaheim, giving amazing Live 1.0 demos non-stop at Ableton's first NAMM booth, and before the last day of the show, we were chatting in the topiary-enhanced parking lot of Stovall's Inn. Having used Max to prototype some of the first effects included with Live, Robert told me he wanted to be able to reprogram his effects on the fly, without stopping the music, just the way everything else worked in Live. At that time, the reality for Robert would have involved translating his revised patch into a C program and rebuilding a new version of Live. This was not exactly the real-time development cycle he was used to as a Max user.

Max Integration into Ableton Live

NAMM • Anaheim, CA • January 15, 2009--Cycling '74 and Ableton today announced Max for Live, the integration of Cycling '74's Max/MSP environment into Ableton Live. Available as an add-on product to Ableton's newly announced Live 8, Max for Live permits users to create devices that extend and customize Live by creating instruments, controllers, audio effects, and MIDI processors.