On my last day in Korea, I wouldn’t even have noticed. Nothing about staring at a heaping bowl of pickled cabbage first thing in the morning would bother me. After one week of eating kimchee three meals a day, every day, the part of me that needed two chocolate croissants and a double americano just to feel normal would finally have acclimated. On day one, however, I’m not quite there yet. After sputtering out a weak, black broth, the coffee machine advises me to “Have a nice time”. I’m giving it my best, but looking down at my bowl of rice with seaweed broth and trying to see oatmeal is more that I can manage. To any outside observer I’m sure I look like what I am: a coffee starved software engineer very much out of his element.

“Excuse me,” I hear someone say, “you must be here for NIME.”

Getting to NIME from the Toyoko Inn requires a fifteen minute taxi ride, circling the government complex at the center of Daejeon and crossing the river into KAIST campus. Staring out the window on the way over, I’m not entirely sure what to make of my surroundings. Based on the gnashing juxtapositions all around me, I’d say the city of Daejeon seems to think it can shock me out of sleep deprivation with bewildering choices in urban planning. The humble government complex, for example, rises no more than three stories high in the center of a large public park, yet towering apartment blocks housing thousands flank the complex to the east and the west. I decide that the squat government building must be nothing more than a gateway, and that beneath the park extends a labyrinth sprawling hundreds of miles underground. Also, peering into the distance beyond two apartment buildings, I notice a strange, metallic spire. It looks like a spaceship from my vantage point, but that would be crazy, my mind must be playing tricks on me. Of course, as we get closer it looks more and more like a spaceship, until it turns out that’s exactly what it is. In an attempt to clash maximally with the drab apartment units on the south side of the river, northern Daejeon sports a giant amusement park.

I give up on trying to understand the city and opt for conversation instead. My first traveling companion is Simon Hutchinson, who when he complains about being fatigued and confused does so in a voice both energetic and lucid. He explains that he’s come to NIME to perform a piece called Shin no Shin, using an iPad to turn touch and acceleration into music. I’m tempted to spout off about Mira, but I decide that there will be plenty of time for that later at my poster session. We exchange a few notes about the iPad as a performance instrument. I wonder if Mira will be useful for musicians like Simon, or if the tools that already exist are good enough.

I’m also fortunate enough to ride with me Adam and Ian of Alphasphere, who tell me about their spherical music making gadget of the same name. My description can’t do it justice, but you can think of the Alphasphere as an overgrown buckyball with aftertouch. For a more precise picture, imagine plastic rings arranged in a ball, with flexible, pressure sensitive fabric stretched over each one. You play the instrument by distorting the fabric, which Alphasphere translates into MIDI and OSC data. As Adam describes the hardware I notice a strange tension in my fingers, my first taste of what I’m now calling NIME Complex Sigma. It’s a debilitating condition that I will encounter several times throughout the conference, characterized by acute mental anxiety and muscle twitching. The cause comes from listening to the description of a revolutionary new instrument; really, really wanting to play it and then not getting to play it.

NIME doesn’t officially start until the next day, but people like me who chose to show up early get to attend one of several workshops. I want to go to all six, but somehow the conference organizers expect me to pick just two. Of course, the whole question of which workshop to choose becomes moot when it turns out that none of us can find the building where we’re supposed to register. Each of the buildings on KAIST campus has a letter and number associated with it, which would in theory make finding a given building an easy task. However, at the center of campus the correlation between number, letter and proximity approaches zero–building E16 is right next to N4. Naturally, asking for directions is an exercise in futility, as what little Korean I know comes from watching Arrested Development. Eventually by walking in ever-widening circles we manage to find the right building. We’re a bit worried about showing up several minutes late, until we notice two crucial facts. Fact one: there is a giant mob of not-at-all-Korean looking people standing outside the building. Fact two: the man who is supposed to lead the first workshop is among them.

Sometimes people who make NIMEs forget to bring keys

When at last we manage to enter, the first thing I discover is that black coffee is not as easy to find as I would have hoped. Canned coffee drinks come easy, with vending machines at every corner offering sugary, undrinkable swill with names like Joy and Yes. But it seems I’m going to have to wait a bit longer to get a taste of something fresh roasted. Not having caffeine impairs my decision making process, which makes my second discovery all the more significant. As it turns out, two of the workshops are free, whereas the other four very much are not. So in the end, I opt for the NIME orientation workshop and for the one on making music with Web Audio.

KAIST poses an anatomical conundrum

Michael Lyons, a NIME veteran and researcher in musical interaction, leads the first workshop. His presentation does a great job of filling in the gaps in my knowledge on NIME related topics, subjects like primary versus secondary feedback (secondary feedback is the sound an instrument makes, primary feedback is everything else it does). He also provides a thought provoking overview of why people make NIMEs in the first place, which I find particularly interesting. Beyond techno-fetishism and fascination with the human-machine relationship, he posits that the #1 reason that people are interested in building new instruments is because of an insistence on cultural fluidity. People want new ways to make sound because they want their own tools–they don’t just accept what’s given to them. No wonder so many NIME builders use Max.

As Michael brings the presentation to a close, my mind is humming with new ideas to take back to the Cycling ‘74 think tank:

• Mapping (between input gestures and sound output) is the heart of NIME, and indeed of instrument building in general.
• MIDI is plug and play, OSC isn’t because there’s no standard
• Programmability is a curse, and it’s important to have long-term versions of things
• Primary feedback (lights, vibrations) is critical for intimacy
• Music is becoming increasingly process oriented as opposed to artifact oriented. People who are not virtuosos are willing to go out in public and make music, and are eager to find a forum to do so.

My second workshop is with Charlie Roberts, the furiously talented man behind the Control app for iPad and iPhone that was in many ways the inspiration for Mira. This workshop was advertised as an introduction to the Web Audio API, so I’m imagining that we’re going to spend the afternoon talking about the complexities of working with audio in a high-level language like Javascript, and the challenges of getting audio to run in the browser on multiple platforms. As it turns out, Charlie has basically solved all those problems already, and so instead he takes on a three hour tour of Gibber. Gibber is a Supercollider-like wrapper around Web Audio that lets you build sample-accurate sequencer and synthesizers in Javascript. Oh, did I mention it’s runtime re-configurable? Anyway, it nearly melts my brain to think about how Charlie’s work could fit together with Max. Imagine a Max-like program running in the browser, with something like Gibber providing the backend to a patchable interface. Imagine using that interface to build and deploy interactive audio to the web. Or, switch your brain with me to Totally Unwarranted Speculation mode and imagine being able to turn any webpage into a programmable patch. It’s a bit of a pipe dream, to be sure, but why bother coming to NIME if you aren’t going to entertain impossible ideas?

Important links from that talk include:

• http://charlie-roberts.com/gibber
• https://github.com/hoch/waax
• http://mohayonao.github.io/timbre/
• http://craig.is/killing/mice
• http://codemirror.net/

After the workshop, we stumble back outside on legs made weak from six hours of sitting. Since I’ve gone over ten minutes without complaining, I seize on the opportunity to mope about the cloudy weather. No one around me seems to pay any attention, perhaps because they wisely understand that overcast and humid is probably an overture for rainy and chilly. For now, we take advantage of the warm weather to restore circulation to our feet and converse about all things NIME. As we chat, we’re treated to the first appearance of the chair of KAIST 2013, Woon Seung Yeo, better known as Woony. I had been told at some point (by someone very foolish) that Koreans have a cultural lacuna when it comes to sarcasm. I suspect that Woony knew this and made it his personal mission to wipe away my misconception. “I encourage you to visit the famous KAIST goose crossing, especially since I know NIME participants are all great lovers of animals,” he says. “Not in that way,” he adds. Woony’s dry and biting wit would only desiccate in the days to come.

The nicest day of the whole conference

Drawing his short opening remarks to a close, Woony directs our attention to the area behind us, where a seemingly infinite quantity of food seems to have materialized out of nowhere. “And now, enjoy the banquet,” he says. “And of course the free beer.”
Well, there you have it. Free beer and unlimited food. No points for guessing how long it took me to fall asleep after that one.

–> Nime, Day 0

Simple Beat Flash to MIDI Clock Software to sync Cross DJ with other Software

Reflection is a performance-installation hybrid work, created entirely with Max.

Audience members enter a room, sit, stare, converse, sleep, stretch, laugh, fart, whatever they feel, in the presence of a digital puppet. This puppet is embodied with traits of sage, therapist, priestess, and prankster, and will listen and watch to whatever the audience member is compelled to share. The puppet is represented visually as a golden 3D humanoid figure, evoking a digital buddha. Movements are captured in advance using a depth camera, and controlled in realtime by the operator. A performer provides its voice, which is pitched low, with slight robotic and reverb effects applied. Once in the presence of this peaceful, enlightened being, audience members can’t help but to experience that rare feeling of tranquility and relaxation. The being invites them to share their thoughts, or to sit quietly in meditation.

Thanks, Julien, for taking the time to do an interview. First off, could you tell us a little about your background?

I’m Julien Bayle from France. After my French diploma in both biology and computer sciences, I worked inside the IT Network Architecture world but played with art & technology every night. Then, naturally, I decided to dive into art completely in 2009.

Since then, I have designed the big protodeck controller for Ableton Live, made my own arduino-based RGB monome clone and attained an Ableton certification. Now, I’m providing a lot of courses about Ableton Live, Max 6 & Max for Live too. Since I can read and write C/C++, Java and other languages, I also design my own tools and other people’s tools using openFrameworks and Processing.

I’m mainly working on my own art, making music and playing my A/V live performance.

I work at the crossroads of sounds, visuals and data, trying to immerse the audience inside my own electronic territories where minimalism remains the master.

I just provided a workshop about “Approaches of A/V performance using Max 6” to Störung festival 8 in Barcelona. I’m definitely exploring and trying to improve my own systems every day to make more intuitive performances and to dive more deeply inside my own art, and my perception of sound and visuals.

What kind of artwork currently has your attention?

I’m currently impressed with, and in love with, minimalistic A/V performances or installation.

I also appreciate particles system, which is something I’m playing with myself. I’m also very interested by generative structures – whatever the form they take – in sound and music, but also in visualization systems.

I like to try coding rules and constraints to play with chance, then to observe the result.

Can you give us some examples of your current or recent work?

My latest performance at Störung festival 8 involved my current sound-reactive lines system. Here is a very short video showing this system just before the show (without music):

Here are some example visuals from that project:

I’m currently designing the whole software & hardware implementation for a piece of art written by Pippo Lionni, with Videospread / Céline Jouenne from Marseille managing the project. “The Village” is a generative piece in which a village of people wakes up, becomes more active – and then is bombed.

The audience can interact with the piece using a small device based on Arduino. I will describe the whole system by sharing some examples in Article 3 of this series – even though this piece is based on openFrameworks. The device uses wireless communication with the controlling computer, and includes some other components like accelerometer, battery power (for autonomy), and an Xbee 2.4 Ghz module for wireless communication. The Arduino module used is the fio model.

This piece includes behavioral sequences for each character which causes them to walk, run, play, sit and sleep. When attacks occur, people run in panic or have “smart” behavior like “fleeing the bomb”. I like to try coding rules and constraints to play with chance, then to observe the result. I will definitively work in that way for some future installations I’ll be designing soon.

…once you are motivated, and once you’ve seen some nice examples of pieces made with the technology, you should dedicate your time to make it.

I had a chance to review your book project: “Programming the Arduino in C”. One of the things I found interesting was that, in addition to presenting the Arduino programming language, you also spent time on both circuit-building and integrations with other technologies (Max and Processing in particular). What did it take to become comfortable in each of these technologies?

I would quote 4 rules I’m often suggesting to my students or friends:

• Look at artists or artworks people made with that technology;
• Work through tutorials;
• Read some books (if you like reading);
• Make your first project!

Looking at existing art or tools made with the targeted technology is a nice way to give you examples, sometimes to reassure your brain – which is always looping over the thought “Is it that technology I have to use?” It can also give you motivation. With your own goals, if you are motivated you’d search out everything on the subject. This is really important when you start learning something new.

At some point, you’ll have to study. Learning Max 6, Processing, openFrameworks or other tools requires one to create basic projects and work through tutorials. Often, people forget this step and want to work directly and quickly. This can be a very good approach because it provides sometimes quick satisfaction. But that can also prevent people from continuing their travel inside a technology: sometimes achieving even a simple result can take hours or days for new users.

So following tutorials provided by the software developers or a related community is definitively a winning way. It shows you real examples, offering you a start and giving you results quickly.

I always suggest people to read books (or ebooks, of course). We can find a lot of books about any of our technologies. Each book provides a different view of the subject. Look at the author background, life and work. It is important to have someone in mind as each book talks to you through paper. I always choose books by people I like or people I’d like to emulate because that works better for me – it makes my learning more efficient.

Finally, I suggest that people dive into their first project ASAP. The time factor is very important for two reasons:

The first is because the quicker you apply things you learned, the better you will remember them. The second is that we all desire results.

I’d add something about making your first project.

When I started my own Arduino-based RGB monome clone (named bonome), I didn’t predetermine all of the details of my project. I think it is important to ignore details at some point.

If I had known what it would take, I probably wouldn’t have ever begun the project. This is a fact – it would have frightened me. So I think there is a message here: once you are motivated, and once you’ve seen some nice examples of pieces made with the technology, you should dedicate your time to make it. So please: just let go of the details and get started.

What is it about the technology of the Arduino that you find most interesting?

The most interesting thing is its straightforwardness. Indeed, you have a tool ready to be used out-of-the-box. You only have inputs, outputs and a couple of useful features (like an Ethernet connector or Bluetooth antenna) depending on the board model you have.

Each Arduino comes with already pre-burnt chipset making them directly usable by using USB to upload our own firmware. The software that it is already burnt (by which I mean written) on the chipset is named the bootloader. We can change that bootloader and put in another one if necessary – this is something I explain in my book.

This bootloader is the first thing loaded when you power up the board. It is able to load the user-firmware and handle incoming data when you upload new firmware using the USB port. This makes things really easy for people who don’t know about chipset programming from scratch.

Another interesting thing for me is the huge community. As we’ve seen in other domains, the Arduino community became a kind of global technology resource, able to globally work, think and make. Today, the community produces/fixes/creates a lot of software – and even hardware (called shields) – around this an Arduino board that has not, itself, evolved a lot.

Although some new boards have appeared (like the Leonardo and Due) with new technologies under the hood, the user’s view of the Arduino remains: it is a simple Printed Circuit Board (PCB) with inputs & outputs. And I, myself, think it has to stay simple and that we, the makers, have to create more complex software.

Have you tried any of the other microprocessors that are in the marketplace? Things like the Maple, Beagleboard or Netduino?

I’ve only played a bit with Raspberry PI.

The only benefit is you have an OS available, not “only” firmware and a bootloader.

For what it’s worth, increasing the number of features increases also two things I don’t really like in these kind of projects:

• The number of points which can potentially have bugs,
• The number of features I will never use but that cannot be disabled.

I’d prefer making things that exactly fit my needs, and the Arduino always holds the answer.

Actually, I’m lying a little bit. I loved the MIDIBOX framework created by Thorsten Klöse. This is another framework dedicated to MIDI hardware for do-it-yourself building and design. I designed the protodeck controller using this system. The MIDIBOX community helped a lot too. The last version of the framework, which also includes other chipsets, are based around a real time OS dedicated to MIDI processing.

I’m a defender of using a hardware interface solely as control & feedback station.

How do you see Max fitting into the world of microprocessors, physical computing and the world of hardware-centric artwork?

We have now pure, high-level, calculation capabilities inside our small form factor laptops. We have to build software running on this hardware, and with Max 6 we can easily do that. Max 6 is optimized such that it can be used to produce the C++ source I need for external components like Audio Units plugins (AU) – directly from my gen~ patches.

Thus, we have real power inside our computer, and we should use it for high level efficiency in sound processing, visuals generation and general data processing.

However, we hardware-lovers want a tangible way to control this processing.

This is not always a requirement for me, but I think of hardware interfaces today as large “macros” for our complex and flexible software systems.

In the chapter 6 of my first ebook (titled “The 6 rules to design the best user-interfaces”, written in 2011), I’m wrote: Aim for a stupid box, but a good computer. Or how to get benefits of technology building unsmart interface?

This situation is still true today.

Why would I try to put a lot of calculations & specific data processing (like audio & video) in small chipsets, having to deal with their processing and energy constraints – as well as other electrical stuff – when I already have a working computer dealing with all of that?

So, I’m a defender of using a hardware interface solely as control & feedback station.

By “stupid box”, I meant that our hardware only has to deal with “lighting an LED”, “reading an encoder value”, and eventually “displaying a message on a LCD screen” and no more. These things are easy to design, but also involve protocols and data providers on the computer side.

Most current hardware controller work like that today.

The Ableton PUSH controller’s power, for example, lies in its physical components, design and nice LCD screen, but it “only” sends/receives basic (and compressed) bytes of informations to the computer. The scripting system processes, sorts, parses and interacts with Ableton Live API – and Max for Live too.

I’m happy to note that the ideas from the beginning of my electronic travel are still totally valid.

Where can we go to find out more about your work – and your interaction with technology?

You can check my website & blog, and keep in touch with me following me on FB. I’m also leading http://designthemedia.com too, which is the core of my teaching and consulting side.

Then, I just have my book “C Programming for Arduino” published by Packt Publishing.

The website to keep in mind is: http://cprogrammingforarduino.com

I’m on my way to write my own book about Max 6 & Gen that would be the book to read if you only know a bit of Max. I won’t dig hardcore details of Gen, but readers will be able to understand all the principles necessary to put their hands inside its core!

I step off the plane. Location: Incheon. Body: Exhausted. Mind: Blank. Between the 12 hour flight, the 15 hour time difference and repeated exposure to the in flight movie, A Werewolf Boy, I can already feel my grip on reality starting to slip away. I make my way through the airport, down to baggage claim and onto the express train for Seoul. As far as I can tell the train was constructed in the year 2040 and brought back in time to the present day. The oleophobic seats conform exactly to every contour of my exhausted body. A flatscreen television unfolds from the ceiling above, presenting a promotional ad for a nearby civic development project. BUILDING, it promises, in blaring, positivist capitals. CIVIL. PLANT. HOUSING. Depictions of enormous glass and steel buildings, assembled by swarms of tiny robots, rise before me. Outside my window, we pass row upon row of small scale farms, sometimes running all the way up to the train tracks. Eventually the train comes to a small bridge connecting Incheon to the mainland. Rising up out of the water I can see huge mounds of dirt and grass, looking like the backs of giant turtles lumbering towards Seoul. I am very sleepy. I decide that they probably are turtles, and I write the following poem:

POEM FOR THE TRAIN TO SEOUL

The fog helps me see the tortoises
Grinding out low channels
And the speculative egrets on long stalks

The tortoises are my cold cows
Ruminating on the countryside
And other fictions
They roar silently
Like old men, or magma

Train tracks are humming
The sound of soft gray wool
And my eyes are as heavy as the tortoises

I decide that this poem is very good, then I fall asleep. When I wake up, we’ve arrived in Seoul, where I must have boarded another train for Daejeon, though I honestly can’t remember. Neither do I remember arriving in Daejeon, finding my hotel, or making my way up to my room. Probably all these things happened, but whether they happened to me or to someone who looks a lot like me I will never know. In the morning a straight line connects my backpack to my suitcase, to a pair of shoes, to where I fell asleep, face down on a still-made bed.

–> NIME, Day 1

Hello everyone!
I’m glad to show you my first official release. This is an EP with five tracks, and the entire project is made in real-time with Max/MSP & Jitter. In fact all of the tracks are recorded simply with Max, same process for the video.

If you want to know how I made everything, you can find my patches description here on Cycling’74.
Click here if you want to know about audio.
Click here if you want to know about video.

Like the name, I wanted to show you a story. One year of my life, reported with sound and visual, emotions and design.
Click here if you want to download the full EP.

I hope you enjoy it.:)

A rework of a Max for Live TB303 with added phasor and an extra waveform. Pieced together into a rack with some chorus and fuzz to give it a Roger Fripp quality, this simple thing can give hours of tweakable pleasure, if you have nothing else to do.

Written with Live 8/Max 5 because they still work just fine.

Have a look and listen to my other Ableton Stuff online. The site is constantly updated and lots of the instruments are free.

Nick Dwyer

Download for free from www.whiteboxsynthmakers.com.

Super6 is a detune plugin based on a reverse-engineering of the Roland JP-8000 SuperSaw oscillator. The original SuperSaw oscillator used 7 stacked detuned sawtooth oscillators to produce a fat wave; three oscillators are tuned below the fundamental, and another three are tuned above.

Super6 takes audio input and uses pitch-shifters to achieve similar effects for any signal. It can produce everything from subtle chorusing to nasty detunes, so if your synth sounds a little thin, Super6 can fatten it up.

It’s not free, but it is very cheap ($5, quick and easy and no Paypal required) and it works in Live 8 / Max 5 and up.

One of the most wonderful aspects of Max is that is used by artists of all disciplines. Ryan Holsopple is working in the space between theatre, performance and film and while his work employs Max on a most sophisticated level the extent of the technology is invisible to the audience. Perhaps after reading this article more people will start using Max for multimedia show control.

Where are you from originally?

I’m from central Pennsylvania. Hershey, Pennsylvania. That’s where I went to high school.

Were you a creative child?

I guess. I was always into performing and acting. That’s what I was trained in as an undergrad. I was always involved in theater, in the school, in that creative realm. I went to East Carolina University, in North Carolina, for acting.

Once I was in that program I realized, “Oh, I can do all this stuff with interactive, telecommunications in performance.”

How did you make the transition to performance art?

That school was more traditional in its approach to acting training, but I was always more interested in experimental theater. So when I moved to New York in ’95, I basically immersed myself in the experimental-theater world and performance there.

I saw Richard Foreman’s work. I was blown away by his work, and eventually got a chance to work with him a couple of times and do theater in the downtown New York scene. That was a lot of fun.

Then I was working with somebody who was applying to the ITP program at NYU [Interactive Telecommunications Program], so I decided to apply to that. I ended up going back to grad school kind of later in life, hoping to find another job. Theater arts just wasn’t that lucrative.

Once I was in that program I realized, “Oh, I can do all this stuff with interactive, telecommunications in performance.” So I kind of got back into that world. I never really escaped it like I intended to.

Are you naturally technical person?

Well, I knew technology through working on pinball machines, radios, and Super 8 films. Those were all my interests. But those were more electro-mechanical and analog. I think I got my first computer in 2001 — an iMac.

Then, when I went into grad school, I started learning more definitively about what was going on in the current state of technology. I learned how to program micro-controllers, and learned the difference between analog and digital in a very hands-on kind of way.

…search, look up, and learn from what other people have done.

How was your experience learning Max?

I’m basically self taught. I never took an actual class at NYU in Max, but in my first class there, Physical Computing, we were learning to program micro-controllers—this was before Arduino had hit the scene. Some of the people in the class were from the Music Tech program and they were using Max. That’s when I first caught a glimpse of it.

We used Max for a group project in that class. I worked with Mirit Tal, who was to become a longtime collaborator of mine from that project on. We took a marionette with an accelerometer on its yolk that moved the marionette around. Basically, it could navigate its way through a time Quicktime VR, using Max. So that was our first Max project and from then on it was like, “Oh, this is a lot of fun — and handy!” [Laughs]

I never really went step-by-step through the tutorials. I just would come up with projects, and would just use it, figuring out as I went how to program with it and so forth.

Get stuck, look it up!

Exactly, especially with all the online resources. I think that the thing I came away with the most from the ITP program was how to search, look up, and learn from what other people have done.

I think a lot of people can be intimidated by Max, but it’s actually a lot less intimidating than writing code. I find it kind of soothing, actually.

[Max] is like the brain center.

Which of your works use Max?

All the performances. I’ve often thought about uploading all the patches from older shows, so people could perform the show again, like it’s a script or a score or something.

Basically, I’m using it as a show control. That’s kind of my approach to Max. I’m a sound designer, but I also control all the elements of the theater through Max. So it’s like the brain center.

I used Max originally so I could still perform on stage. I didn’t want a stage manager or anybody cueing the show, because that’s too difficult to bring somebody in for free to do that kind of work. So Max is an easy way for me to be able to control it from the stage. By using switches, sensors or buttons from the stage, and I could retain control the sound and lights.

The most recent performance I did, called Here at Home, was a heavily Max programmed piece. It also had a lot of surround sound using the z.abstractions from Zachary Seldess, which enable you to use it with multichannel audio, and move the sound around the space.

There have been a few articles recently using DMX and Max, which I think is exciting that people are doing that more, in the show-control world. That you can actually run a show, sound and lights and everything. And these theaters have all this technology, and you can kind of tap into that.

So, you use Max primarily for performance work?

I basically have two modes of how I’m using Max. One is with the theater company, where everything is based on Max. But also I freelance as a programmer for other people as well.

Some of the projects that I posted on the Cycling ’74 web site are where I’ve programmed using Max for other people’s projects.

Can you give us an example of how you applied your Max expertise for other clients projects?

A recent one, The Shooting Gallery that’s up there, that I developed for artist Bill Morrison, with composer Richard Einhorn. He wanted to have the audience enter a space with laser pointers so they become the controllers of what films they see.

There are four screens that show the films, comprised of archival footage that Bill manipulates. So the audience members would come in with laser pointers, and like an old-time target range, they would use them to ‘shoot’ at targets on other video screens to choose which video was played — a pretty chaotic, wild time. It was at BAM, the Brooklyn Academy of Music this past November.

That was a heavy, heavy Max programmed piece. Four cameras had to go on the targets the people were pointing at with laser pointers, and then basically when they hit targets with the laser pointer, I had to know when that happened, and how to activate video with it. I had to use a six-computer system.

I was using the Computer Vision library from Jean-Marc Pelletier, the cv.jit tools. I was basically looking for the brightest pixels, so the laser pointer was always brighter than the image. It also counts, from brightest pixel on down. It will track those on the screen and assign it a number. Then I could do things like count how many laser pointers were on a screen.

We even had certain parts of the show where people had to work as a group together. The more lasers were all on one screen, the more affected the video on other screens. It’s kind of a learning process with immediate feedback.

It’s really fun to create a piece that was interactive, that people had to figure out how to use it and work together as a group.

I use [peakamp~] to look at the sound wave and get numbers out of that, which can port right over to lighting or video or anything really.

Do you ever write your own objects?

No, I don’t write my own objects. I usually can find one to fit the bill. If I come up against a wall, there’s always someone who has already, for the most part, solved it. Which is great.

Do you have a favorite object?

I really like the peakamp~ object, which I use because I do a lot programming where sound controls lighting, or sound controls something. I use it to look at the sound wave and get numbers out of that, which can port right over to lighting or video or anything really. So I use peakamp~ a lot!

Artists that I work for are always really into random. So I use the RTC-lib, the Real Time Composition library by Karlheinz Essl. He has a lot of very cool, random abstractions.

Any chance to make something more random is always desired! [Laughs]

I built a scream-o-meter with Max, that measures the pitch and loudness of the screams.

How are you going to challenge yourself in the future?

That’s a good question. We have 31 Down, the company that I started for interactive performance and installation development.

We have an interactive installation that we did a few years ago at this rock and art festival in Seattle called Bumbershoot. Basically it’s a screaming contest, with a live band playing on stage. People from the audience can come up and read a radio-theater scene with me behind a screen while the band plays — and it always ends with a scream!

It’s called The Scream Contest and is based on how high and loud you can scream. I built a scream-o-meter with Max, that measures the pitch and loudness of the screams. Kids usually win it, because their screams are incredibly high. But it’s an installation for the whole family, which I think is a lot of fun, because kids like to do it.

Sounds like good family fun! [Laughs]

It really is!

There’s an old Marine base in Orange County that has an old World War II hangar, and we’ve been asked to come and do the Scream Contest coming up in March. The big challenge is how do we fill that space, but also make it sound really great and get people to scream so we can measure it.

And then I have a show next fall, with 31 Down, where we’re trying to use hypnotized actors. I guess the idea around it is; can you control performers like you can a light? Can they become an object that you can turn on and off, and can you manipulate them through hypnosis to say, to turn around or to cry?

So it’s still in the full-on experimental stage right now, I don’t have the answers yet.

How do you purpose to use Max to communicate these instructions to the hypnotized performers?

Well, my instinct is through sound. Of course, they could wear an in-ear receiver, where somebody can actually talk to them through it. But my first thought is to trigger a response through sound. There are frequencies in the audio that the human can hear, and certain frequencies are attached to different emotional colors. The audience might not perceive the frequency as anything but part of the sound design, but the performers on stage could be attuned to them.

So for instance in Max, I could send out a certain frequency of sound wave amongst a sound design, and then the performer hears that and turns to the right, or cries.

It’s all based on the hypnotist, so I don’t know exactly if it will work. But that’s what we’re trying to do in the future. I think it will be fun.

I just want to keep treading new territory…

31 Down’s Website

Text interview by Marsha Vdovin and Ron MacLeod for Cycling ’74.

A realtime sculpture in spatial light and sound.

Integration.04 is a live performance by Dieter Vandoren. His instrument projects light and sound structures in fog-filled space, immersing both him and the audience in it. He manipulates the ephemeral audiovisual shapes as if they were tangible materials, taking cues from the interaction between the human body and acoustical instruments. The abstract digital processes are thus projected into physical, experiential space and the emergent play becomes a strong embodied experience – for both performer and audience.

The 77_GS started as a pet project, turned into a solution to a particular task, and then became a performance instrument.

The instrument is based on granular synthesis, which is a technique that can be explored and utilized in many different ways, yielding a great many different results. The defining characteristics of this particular instrument are the simultaneous use of two source samples, and the “morph control”. The latter lets you save different settings of the instrument’s parameters to four different “states”, and then interpolate (or morph) from one state to the next using the modwheel of a MIDI-keyboard. In practice, this means that it’s possible to create fluent transformations from one source sample to the other. However, while this was the originally intended use of the instrument, it is but one of many possibilities that come with the implementation of granular synthesis.

The files are free and entirely open for study and modification (but not resale). Download can be found in the “Sound Design” section of my website.

Hello everyone. :)
Now is the time to show you a new up date of my first M4L Device, click here if you want to see the last page.
There are many improvements in this version:
1. Possibility to bounce your work with this effect;
2. Preset saved with your Ableton Live project,
3. Control of threshold for grain record;
4. Improved algorithm;
5. Remains only the reverb, use Live Effects to create unique sounds.

I want to talk about the point five, in fact a made the choice to remove some effects for example “digitalize” parameter, because now the algorithm is more efficient and I want to give the possibility to create uniques Rack Effects. So the plugin will make only the sound, after you can make what you want. :)
In this video there are two types of utilization, one for ambient music and the other for an aggressive sound.

Click here for download page.

Enjoy it! :)

The goal of the project was to create a drummer-friendly performance environment for my solo project Endre-eNerd where Live reacts instantly to all commands and the desired scenes/clips can be launched without losing sync,  I get visual feedback about the playback status of the performance and every aspect of the performance can be controlled from the drumkit without having to drop the drumsticks.

More info on the show can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIJLb7QJkx8

The setup contains a series of MFL plugins, of which the most important three ones will be covered here.

There is a long explanatory video on YouTube that speaks for itself, demonstrates all three plugins and shows their use in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aN2GGKi2G74

Having the video, I didn’t think there would have been any point writing a long essay on what the plugins do. The sections below were simply extracted from the video and can give an idea on what the setup can do, but it is highly recommended to watch the video in order to fully understand the potential that lies in the system.

The video from which the software chapters were excerpted also demonstrates the hardware components of the system and gives some more usage examples: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEGtHpOYHB4

“Today, when they sell way more electronic drumkits than acoustic, I still see that drummers are somewhat intimidated by electronics, which is a pity, because drummers are the first to be told by their band leaders before going to the studio that “you don’t need to come and play, we’ll manage with a groove library”.

And this is exactly why drummers should be aware of all the technologies which other musicians use for drums and maybe even strike back and take electronic drumming to a further level and do some of the things which are normally done by other band members or even DJs.

I’ve always been interested in using electronics in my acoustic drumkits and like for most drummers it started with simply triggering some samples and sound fxs, but I always wanted to do something more complex and tried to take full control of electronics without sacrificing my musical freedom and spontaneity.

I wanted a setup where I could interactively communicate with the sequencer while playing the drums. There has always been a problem with taking sequencers on stage in improvised music and it was a great leap forward when Ableton Live appeared and took the interactivity between musicians and computers to a further level, but even Live has its limitations which make it difficult to take full control of it while playing an instrument, so in many bands you’ll see a DJ or someone who deals with the computers only.

Unfortunately most software were not designed with drummers in mind and we had to do some serious development to come up with a system I needed. One might wonder what I mean exactly by saying “not designed with drummers in mind” you might ask the question what makes drummers so special that they’d need special tools?

By my view there are two crucial differences to other instrumentalists and DJs. One is that while playing the drumkit we’re like Captain Hook or Edward Scissorhands and have no free fingers to type on a computer keyboard or touch some delicate knobs and faders and even more, we normally don’t have any free limb to stomp on a foot controller either, so our only way to communicate with the outside world is to hit things with a drumstick, which is not really welcomed by most objects.

The other difference between us and other instrumentalists is that drumming is about “now”. We’re certainly not like DJs who can peacefully listen to what’s coming next, then check their emails, play some computer games while waiting for the changes to become audible to the audience. We expect instant response on whatever we do on the drumkit and most softwares are not designed like that so that was our biggest challenge while creating this setup.

The setup has some custom built and customized hardware pieces and some software components.

Once the MIDI signal hits the computer, the rest has to be done by the software. The main sequencing host of the setup is Ableton Live, which is surely the most widely used daw software on-stage, but for me it took quite a while to make a decision of building the whole system around it, and the reason for this was that it wasn’t designed with drummers in mind and some of the key features I needed were missing from it, until Ableton launched MFL, the development environment which finally made it possible for us to develop the plugins I needed for my performances.

This is not a Live tutorial, so I’m not going to spend time on explaining how Live works, but I’ll tell about how I use it and what our custom plugins do.

A quick word about what the features I missed most were: most people I know use Live on stage with the quantize value set to one bar and trigger the next clip or scene during the last bar of the currently playing part.

This approach might be good for most instrumentalists, but certainly not very convenient for drummers, for two main reasons: during the last bar of song parts we often play fills, when we don’t really have a free limb to launch new clips and also -as I mentioned earlier- anything we hit in a drumkit reacts instantly, so it feels kind of awkward that you hit a pad and nothing happens until we get to the next bar.

So I wanted to have a solution where everything I do on the drum pads would be instantly executed in my Live session. If you’re familiar with Live you might think this is no big deal, setting the quantize value to None would do exactly this which is right in theory, but wouldn’t work in a real life situation.

Just consider that all the acoustic pieces in the drumkit have zero latency: you get the sound immediately when you hit them, but this is not the case with electronics. It’s not so apparent when you just trigger single samples, but things can get really bad when trying to layer several loops on top of each other. So in certain situations it’s virtually impossible to play a kit where half of the playing surfaces have zero latency and the rest has a slight delay.

When you hit a drumpad, the impact of the drumstick virtually immediately creates a trigger signal, but this signal has to go through a number of processing steps before we can actually hear anything. The first stage is to convert the analog trigger signal to MIDI. This takes a few moments usually ranging from 1 to 4 milliseconds -depending on the hardware and the settings.
As I mentioned I use the good old MIDI protocol for its stability, so in my case this delay must be around 4 ms. Once the MIDI signal hits the computer, it must be determined what that signal will do: whether it will launch a new scene or clip, or it will play a sound of a VST instrument or perform a mixer control action like muting or soloing a channel or it will control the playback transport etc.

So, this step also will increase the latency and then the sound has to be generated and sent to the output of the audio interface which again adds some more delay to the signal. So a lot of things must happen before we get any sound and what makes things even worse is that this latency is different for each action type, so the delay of the signal will be different when launching a new scene from the delay when triggering a sound of a VST sampler instrument.

And most importantly we mustn’t forget that we’re humans -at least most of us keep trying to be- and we play with minor inaccuracies which is a very good thing for getting that signature groove but it’s definitely no good for triggering loops, which in most cases should happen precisely on the beat or on an other point of the quantize grid and this is especially true when you want to layer multiple loops on top of each other and all these little inaccuracies add up and make the whole texture sound very sloppy.

THE PLUGINS

ClipSynchronizer
So to sort out these latency and inaccuracy issues we developed a Max For Live plugin that makes it possible for me to trigger everything instantly without losing sync.

So when I trigger a new scene or clip it starts to play back immediately and then the plugin makes up for the latency and makes the playback of the newly launched parts aligned with the grid. And because we’re talking about very tiny inaccuracies in the few milliseconds range, in most cases it’s not audible at all when the plugin is in effect and makes these minor adjustments.

(…) The plugin is switched on all the time and applies to most clips in the set, but if a track name starts with a star sign the clips on that track will bypass the plugin which can be useful in some cases. The plugin works silently in the background, it has no fancy user interface, just a number of initial parameters like how fast the playback adjustments should be done…

The operation of the plugin is based on a similar technique that’s known from software samplers, which only store the initial portion of long samples in the memory, so that the playback could start immediately on hitting a note on the keyboard and the playback of this initial chunk gives the software enough time to retrieve rest of the sample from the hard disk and continue the playback from there.

This technique makes possible the low latency playback of those huge multisampled instruments which don’t fit the memory.

Similarly to this, my clip synchronizer plugin launches the clips immediately without any quantization and after a predefined time a quantized shadow clip will take over the playback.

Setting up a Live set for the plugin is quite complex so we have no time to go through all the steps now, but the plugin itself has only one adjustable parameter. This value tells the plugin how long it should take to make the playback aligned with grid. So for example setting this value to 1/4 means that the playback will get quantized in 1/4 after launching the clip or the scene.

128-Loops
This is a plugin that makes it really easy to program what the drum pads do in a specific Live scene.

If you have a trigger to MIDI converter, you know that you can assign a MIDI note to every pad and these assignments can be saved in setups or kits, which can then be recalled, so that when there’s a song where this pad plays a vocal effect and this one plays a brass section fall and then a new song comes where the same pads do something completely different, the new note assignment for all pads can be recalled by a single command.

But because the same pads can be used to control more than one thing during the performance, programming can get excessively complex and very hard to maintain with multiple devices. The pad-to-MIDI converter’s setup changes always have to be in sync with the currently playing scene, otherwise the pads might do something that belongs to a totally different part of the set.

So to keep thing nice a tidy, I decided to leave the pad to MIDI converter alone and use a single setup for the whole performance and make all the MIDI note assignment changes internally in Live and this is handled by this plugin. It collects all incoming MIDI notes and translates them into other MIDI notes which correspond to the currently playing scene within the Live set. So this makes sure that the right note assignments will always be recalled at the right time and that all setups will be stored in the Live set.

These two fields show the incoming MIDI notes and the two fields below them show the outgoing notes generated by the plugin. There are four operating modes:

• Block mode means that the incoming notes will get swallowed, so there’s no outgoing note.
• Cycle mode is the most common operating mode. The root note is the first outgoing note that the plugin will generate for the selected incoming note. The Steps parameter sets the number of adjacent notes to cycle through with the outgoing notes. So e.g. if it’s set to 1 the Root note will be the only outgoing note, setting it to 2 will cause the plugin to alternate between the Root note and one semitone above it. setting it to 3 will tell the plugin to cycle through three notes: the Root note and the two semitones above it and so on. The note length parameter sets the length of the outgoing notes and Threshold sets the minimum velocity required for an incoming note to activate the plugin.
• Random mode is similar to Cycle mode, but instead of cycling through the specified range of notes chromatically, in this mode the plugin will randomly pick an outgoing note from the specified range. And finally, in bypass mode the outgoing notes are always identical to the incoming notes.

When all my pads are set up in the plugin, the kits can be stored and recalled by MIDI program changes. The MIDI clips which transmit the program changes are placed into the right scene so launching any scene in the whole set will always recall the corresponding note assignment for all my drumpads.

PlaybackStatusDisplay
This is a very useful plugin that gives me visual feedback on the currently playing scene and the playback pointer and it can also display reminders before hitpoints. … So it’s as if I had the scores for the whole show but only the current row would be visible which saves me a lot of space and it’s always in sync with the playback pointer.

The plugin has no adjustable parameters, it only has a Reopen window button which does exactly that: it reopens the playback status display. The window layout is very straightforward: on the left side it shows the name of the currently playing scene, the name of the next scene and the name of the previous scene.

On the right side there is a time display that shows the playback position in a bars and beats format.

Below this section you can see the playback pointer strip. Bars are separated with the green lines and the number of bars represent the length of the current part of the tune. This obviously doesn’t mean that all clips must have the same length for that scene, so for example it’s no problem to have a 2 bar loop in an 8 bar verse, but the length of this strip will always represent the length of the song part that’s playing back.

When I launch a new scene, the display reflects this action and shows the current scene name and length and the playback pointer bar is always in sync with the playback position.

Seeing all this information during the performance is really great, but the plugin has some more very useful features. It can highlight the important hitpoints of song parts and can display messages about them:

The highlighted bars are shown in red and the related text message appears at the bottom of the plugin window. I often use this feature and use a very simple scoring method for the messages, which can be easily read by anyone who’s a little familiar with step sequencers or drum editors.

Setting up the plugin is really easy: just create a guide track with a clip for every scene and insert the plugin into that track. The length of the clips should correspond with the length of the song part they belong to as this will determine the number of bars shown in the playback display strip. If there are messages you want to display in the bottom row, just type them into the clip name, start with the number of the bar they should apply to and separate them with commas and you’re ready to go.”

My personal additive synth totally built using max. I used 12 sinusoidal waves to make the addive part and after i added a simple sinusoidal LFO and some effects like reverb (using the tool nw.gverb~),an useful multitape delay, a simple bit crusher made using the degrade~ object, a flanger and a chorus. I made it to be used inside live set or music production. i used the Johannes Schmidt patch for midi learn.
Special thanks to Davide Abate for the grafic touch.

Download zip file.

Saxelectro Project Live MOVING HEADS
Andreas Mourtzoukos (saxelectro)
L.P.M. Edition XIII May 23rd – 26th 2013
21.54 pm Thursday 23 May
Brancaleone Via Levanna, 13 00141 – Rome
www.brancaleone.eu

MOVING HEADS is an Audiovisual Performance.
Based on Generative Processing in Sound Creation,
Music Composition, Improvisation, and Visuals.
The moving of saxophone controls the musical events, the sound, the vfx, the rate of video playing and the the direction of sound because this project has live surround sound.
The player (saxelectro) controls the audio fx and some of the vfx by the sound of saxophone and improvises according to the music.

Saxophones Thru Electronics Interactive multimedia and Visuals
http://t.co/Ub3m8dG2EM
http://2013.liveperformersmeeting.net/artists/saxelectro/
http://saxelectro.com/spl_projects/moving_heads
http://2013.liveperformersmeeting.net/artists/saxelectro/performances/moving-heads/

Bouncer is an audio software built for textural audio application using Lemur application for real-time control.
Audio using granular synthesis generated by physical bounce/contact on 2D surface border.

You can load folder with sample sounds and change it without audio interrupt (samples are load on RAM / number of sound limit to 127) or choose individual one.

audio stuff : pitch control / envelope with time interpolation (in sec) / several harmonic/pitch mode control / level fader

Audio Settings / OSC Settings (IN/OUT)

On Lemur you can control physics properties and Several stuff about balls behavior, and sound properties.

ENJOY !

Sotfware have testing on osx 10.7
direct download

Streakline #1 is the second part of Tryptic, a set of three Audio Visual live projects by Franz Rosati started in 2011 with Pathline #1. Every project is based on a strong use of generative/audioreactive 3D Graphics and loud real-time processed sounds coming from field recordings and acoustic instruments, organized and structured via chaos theory and probabilistic algorithms. The visual part, composed by simple lines and dots want to remind to a synthetic/organic life-form morphing by its own behavior in a constant balance between tension, chaos and order. Spasms, tortions, vibrations and high speed rotations, are connected to apparently out of control distorted sounds, suffocated harmonies and outlined irregular pulses, through crescendos and sudden comebacks to silence.
Tryptic [Pathline #1, Streakline #1, Streamline #1] is based on custom made software Honegumi [sound] + Tryptic [Visuals] developed by Franz Rosati and can be reproduced as interactive installations and large scale prints.

The Rad Envelope Follower

REF is a Max For Live envelope follower with advanced features. It allows you to modulate anything you want in Ableton Live: other devices, the user interface, and third party plug-ins, using sound as source.

You can shape the incoming audio source with the low/high pass filter, listening the source in peak or rms modes, then design the envelope exactly how you need it, using tools as relative/absolute modes, linear/logarithmic modulation, and positive/negative directions. You can even work on your envelopes with standard EG parameters as attack, hold, release, and a global delay time.

REF uses a big display to give you an accurate visual feedback: it will help you to check the incoming audio signal, set the threshold level, and view the real envelope generated, which will control the chosen target parameter.

REF is a great tool for any kind of modulation: kick/bass side-chain combinations, driving filters, and experimental uses asking for controlling parameters from an audio source.

Developed on the Max 6 engine, taking advantage of gen~, REF supports both 32 and 64-bit mode.

No external objects are used in REF.

Features:

• Filter your source – use lo/hi-pass filter to listen to the signal frequencies you need.
• Envelope Design Tools – peak or rms following mode. Create linear or logarithmic envelopes, with relative or absolute ranges.
• Threshold – filter signal amplitude to create only the envelopes you need.
• Envelope Time Functions – Delay/Attack/Hold/Release will help you to create amazing control signals.
• Gen~ Powered – the best performance possible.
• Select your target – modulate any parameter in your Live set with just a click.

REF is FREE until May 31st, then €3.99.

Get REF here

theremin like musical instrument for monome arc2

2 knobs on arc : 1 for loudness/timber morph, 1 for pitch

2 sound sources : fm and bandpass noise

2 pitch modes : unquantized and quantized (thanks to ScaleMaster http://xfade.com/max/ScaleMaster/)

2 vst send effect

preset system saves everything inluding the vst plugin filepatch and settings

left knob = initial value
middle knob = from which knob position the timber morph begins
right knob = mod depth (left is negative, right is positive)
the [R] beside knobs will reset the corresponding knob to center

http://mengqimusic.com

Hello everyone, I’m here to present you a new A/V project.
I like to create audio-reactive visuals, and this project is the result of an extremization of all of parameters of my patch to represent a simple ring modulation. In fact, the audio source is not a real soundtrack, but only a ring modulated cycle with the possibility to change only the amplitude and frequency.
At the end, This patch works with small rules carried to extremes, to create abstract and interesting audio-reactive artworks.
This video is a simple demonstration only with changing the frequency.
Click here if you want to see some experiments.
Click here if you want to see the full catalog.

Enjoy the Abstract. :)

Bow_o_Rama born from the desire to create a simple application of intuitive music, a small sound object that can stimulate the desire of the listener to discover acoustic particles; the audience is not a mere spectator, but an active part of the creative process.

The choice of my instrument, the viola da gamba, an emblem of the Baroque period and the instrument on which I decided to start a journey in searching new sounds and languages, is also related to the specific desire to give an acoustic sound texture to the audio.

Each sample presented in Bow_o_Rama is uncompressed, aiff to 44.100/24 bit, in order to ensure to the listener an audio CD quality, in contrast to the compression of common downloadable digital formats.

The application certainly is not perfect, I’m not a programmer but a musician, it’s the first app that I did using MAX 6 and is a first step towards the desire to offer a new way to enjoy music and contemporary art. Hope you will like it, and I’d love to know what you think about it (also bugs reports and suggestions)! :)

Here the link:

BOW_O_RAMA (Mac version)

A few months ago we made the decision to trim down our office size and send some physical merchandise like shirts, audio libraries, and music releases to Amazon for fulfillment. We plan to be adding some new, fun products in the future, too.

For those of you who love [have] Amazon Prime, you know what this means. There is nothing stopping you… sort of.

We often resort to the old fairytale riff about the trail of breadcrumbs when we try to summarize an artist’s biography. If you try that with Dan Trueman, you may come away with the distinct impression that you’re chasing two very different people who just happen to have the same, somewhat uncommon name.

For the garden-variety Max user trainspotter, the lights will automatically go on – he’s one of the guys who worked on the PeRColate set of Max/MSP objects.

Those more inclined toward laptoppery in general will know him as the founder of PLOrk, the very first laptop orchestra. Fans of the Cycling ’74 record label will know his work half of the duo interface with Curtis Bahn (their c74 release ./swank comes highly recommended).

Oh yeah. He is also that kind of composer who writes down instructions for other musicians to follow (the Brentano, Daedalus, Cassatt and Amernet string quartets, the Non Sequitur ensemble, and so on). More on that in a minute.

And then there’s the other Dan Trueman, adept on the Hardanger fiddle, half of the folk duo Trollstilt, and a veritable Catherine Wheel of fiddle tune production in outfits as diverse as the Brittany Haas and Dan Trueman band, and the largely unclassifiable acoustic outfit QQQ.

The arrival of his latest release on Cantaloupe Music of the piece Neither Anvil Nor Pulley, written for So Percussion gave me an excuse to talk to both Dan Truemans at the same time.

I sometimes find myself marginalizing the technological side of what I do, even though I absolutely love it…

Since I know you a little bit and know how much of your musical life over the last couple of years has been involved with making tunes and playing the hardanger fiddle, I wanted to start by asking you about where and how you situate work of the sort that you’ve made for So Percussion….

It’s ongoing, that thing of being able to sort out things out in terms of situating my work in software or engineering or new technology. I really do have a lot of hangups with it, and it’s an ongoing problem – some of it having to do with the fact that when I was learning electronic music, I hated most of it. This was academic electronic music in the early 1990s. I wasn’t interested in most of the academic electronic music available to me at the time. It’s less so now, but there’s also an ongoing sense that if you do electronic music, you’re somewhat marginalized or somehow not a “real musician.” Even though I wonder how this could possibly be an objection since I play fiddle every day, I’m still very sensitive about it. I sometimes find myself marginalizing the technological side of what I do, even though I absolutely love it, and even though so much of what I do these days really grows directly out of an engagement with the technology.

This piece for So Percussion would not have happened without a full-on wrestling match with new technologies and programming – it just wouldn’t have happened in any other way. It’s not a piece that could have existed without that. It’s always at the heart of what I do, but the hangups are still there – I’m putting that front and center in terms of how I do things here….

So here I am to talk to you about that programming and technology stuff….

So I had to write up this technical brief about the piece that the record company asked for, and working on it I was thinking, “Wow. There’s some cool stuff here. I should be celebrating this!”

The thing that started me thinking about method even before I heard a note of the piece was the imagery of the title – a title like “Neither Anvil Nor Pulley” seemed to have something to do with the idea of force or work being hidden in some way. But I didn’t imagine that you were thinking of the work in terms which were quite so physical. Those anvils and pulleys are Rube Goldberg devices, not metaphors….

That’s right – even in the first big movement of the piece (the second section), they’re whacking on these pieces of wood the way you’d whack on an anvil in order to reset the phase of these digital metronomes that they’re playing with. But it’s NOT the same thing as an anvil, and in the second half they’re using these tethers – Have you tried these?

Hmmm. No.

This is the tether, the magic instrument used in laptop orchestras everywhere. It’s my favorite controller ever. It’s basically two 3d joysticks whose cables stretch something like 12 feet with a little bit of pull on ‘em. Six axes on ‘em. They’re magnificent – made for a golf game, originally. They’re 15 bucks, and you get 6 high-resolution signals from it. The PLOrk has maybe a dozen pieces now that use these – we get the whole group using them together, doing this sort of choreography inspired by the instrument and the way it’s mapped for controlling sound

[a pause ensues, during which the interviewer geeks out waving his arms around around, laughing, and imagining control data]

So Percussion uses this in the first movement – all four players are performing this composed kind of sonic choreography. Invariably, people really connect with them in performance – “What was that thing with the strings on it?”

It sounds like their response is somehow connected to the interface making sense in the way that the physicality of percussion performance works – the use of the interface “fits” somehow.

Exactly.

…make something that really got to the heart of what [incredible musicians] can do and what computers can do.

So, if the piece isn’t possible without software, where did the idea come from? Was it about physical movement first?

I spent three or four months trying to start this piece. I couldn’t find the thing that felt physically and rhythmically engaging in a way that I’d feel like asking these incredible musicians to play it.– it was terrifying. I didn’t want to just give them something where they’d press a button and stuff would just happen. I wanted to challenge them, to challenge their training, to challenge their musicianship – to make something that really got to the heart of what they can do and what computers can do.

So about three months in, I was trying various things and I made this little instrument – a piece of wood with a piezo on it – I’d hit it, and there’s a click going by at 120 bpm and my hitting it would reset the phase of the click, creating this little hiccup in the phase of the metronome. I spent something like 3 days just playing that instrument, just getting lost in the thing and exploring the rhythmic possibilities. I realized that I was on to something, because if I could get lost in this – breaking a sweat playing this instrument for a couple of days – well, there’s something there. So that’s where it came from – it came from trying to build something and feeling like I now had something I could see them REALLY being challenged by in an interesting way. In the piece, there are four players working with this thing – I’ve got these bits where they’re playing these hocketed rhythms tekkaTEKkaTAKketa on the wood blocks and the metronomes pick it up and go with what they play and then they’re trying to engage with that metrically. And if you think of that idea of resetting the phase of the metronome, if you keep hitting the block of wood late consistently, you can slow down the tempo in a totally smooth and fluid way – until you hit a Nyquist of sorts and you’re suddenly going too slowly and it catches up and hits double-time again.

So there’s nothing particularly mindbendingly complicated there in terms of the patch or the software that does what you describe, is there? Is it as simple as it seems to me to be?

Well, sort of it’s done in both Max and in ChucK. In fact, the whole piece is both of them running in tandem and communicating via OSC. The timing is done in ChucK. One of the things that’s a little tricky – I know that I could have done this in Max, but I was programming quite a bit in ChucK at the time – there’s sort of an appendage to the process I just talked about: you’ve got these clicks going, and each has a pair of tuned pipes with pickups on them. I’ve got this system where when they hit the pipe, the laptop looks at where it is in the current phase and it says, “I see that we have 400 ms. until the next click. So, for 200 ms of that time, I’m going to sample the sound of the pipe, and for the other 200 I’m going to play it backwards so that it reaches its peak at the next click. So you get these reverse delays, but they’re synchronized with this phase of this metronome that you’re resetting through another separate mechanism. So where you hit the bar relative to that click, you’ll get a different kind of swell. That was also an extraordinary amount of fun once I’d gotten it set up the first time – I had it set up with this flowerpot. I’d halve the tempo so that it was going at 30 bpm, so we’re looking at like 2 seconds off – you can hit it just before it or just after it and get these long swells or really short swells. These swells are crucial for helping the players feel the metronome’s cycle, especially when the tempos are really slow; you can really feel where the next beat is going to come, rather than trying to just internally predict it.

All of that timing stuff – I didn’t do that in Max. I did that in ChucK; in part because that timing stuff in ChucK is so stupid easy to manage. I’m using Max with bonk~ to do all the input tracking, and they’re talking back and forth. This is pretty much how I work now, with Max and ChucK in tandem.

These sorts of combinations are super powerful, with Max acting as a sort of glue.

The timing stuff stays in ChucK, then?

Yeah. ChucK’s got this notion of NOW built into it, and it’s also not vectorized, so everything runs at the sample rate – it’s very inefficient, but it also makes it very transparent in terms of dealing with time. It’s very easy to make timing measurements and to schedule things in the future in a way that I could perhaps do in Max, but I’ve always found a lot more cumbersome – so things related to scheduling and timing are all done in ChucK. I leverage a lot of the other stuff in Max – bonk~, of course, but I also do all the spectral stuff. For instance, the tether instrument in this piece uses this phase vocoder instrument where I can freeze-frame though a sample in each hand – it’s got some processing built in – a little smoothing, a little companding – so that you can bring out noisy or more pitched elements. Basically, in this piece they’ve got a fiddle sample “in each hand” with particular pitches and transitions between the pitches and I can specify “at this point in time, you should be at the transition between these two notes”… you know how the sound is in a phase vocoder where you’re sort of freezing yourself at a point where there’s this great pitched material and other points where there’s this gritty transitional material. That’s all Max all the way – the spectral stuff in Max is very efficient and it’s easy to go in and do some nice processing….

And obviously, I just Max when I want interface stuff – display of information, sliders. Oh yeah – I love the fiddle~ object for feature extraction, too.

And some of what I’m doing is sort of the opposite of the Max for Live thing; instead of embedding Max in a large GUI-based time system, I embed a text-based timing system inside of Max. These sorts of combinations are super powerful, with Max acting as a sort of glue.

One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you about your use of Max has a lot to do with you being one of the co-creators of the PeRColate objects with Luke DuBois. I expect that there are a lot of folks out there who primarily are aware of you for precisely that reason rather than your life as a composer or player, and while those objects are great and still work fine, you may not have been on their radar for a while – they’re left trying to infer your life and work from a collection of external objects. [laughs]

They’re ten years old now.

The individual breadcrumbs you dropped along they way have individually become tourist locations in their own right….

Well, to answer your question, there are two things that happened since I worked with Luke on PeRColate: one is that I was using those objects when I was playing with Curtis Bahn. And then we started the Princeton Laptop Orchestra here. One of the things that the laptop orchestra forced or invited me to do – depending on what kind of mood I’m in – was to be more “generous” with what I make so that people can play them – instead of making things that were entirely idiosyncratic in a way that I and only I could play them – no one could look at the patch and have an idea of what to do.

There needed to be a kind of transparency in the things you made. Transparency beyond the kind of refpage description of things. More the whole “helpfile as an example of what you might do” approach.

In some ways, that’s something that we often don’t get from composers. In a way, it may wind up being one of the great gifts to the rest of us of the era of laptop orchestras, over and above the music itself.

It think that’s absolutely true – to me, it’s been transformative to have been “forced” to do this. In part, the reason it’s been relevant also has been that my efforts now, instead of being focused on making another munger~, have been focused on making pieces and interfaces and things that other people can use. That’s where lots of my cycles since PeRColate have been spent. And finally, this piece for So Percussion would simply NOT have happened without that change in focus and effort.

So you’re describing the invisible and intermediate steps from PeRColate to “Neither Anvil Nor Pulley”, aren’t you?

Yeah. So I’m learning to make these things for other people to play, and this percussion group comes to me and wants a piece. But I’ve got 4 of the most virtuosic players on the face of the planet, so what am I going to do to engage them?

Does this piece precede your earlier “5 ½ gardens”?

No, this is a lot later. That piece had a little laptop component, but it was just me controlling the thing with footpedals. So Percussion didn’t do any laptop stuff in that at all. Jason from So Percussion is the drummer in QQQ, a band project of mine. So I’d worked with them before, but it was more from the standpoint of the acoustic composer or fiddler/collaborator perspective. We’d had So Percussion play with the PLORK several times before. The first time was our first concert, which included Zakir Hussain. I invited SO to join us in part just to deal with the having the world’s best drummer playing with the world’s first laptop orchestra – no offense to the students in that group, who were terrific. It was just sort of inevitably problematic, since we’d never done this before. So Percussion was great – for them, it was a thrill to play with Zakir, so it worked all around.

So after all that, they came to me and actually wanted something with some more serious laptop component to it. I guess I was at a point where I wanted to reach outside of PLORK in this process, too. – I wanted to see what it would be like to make these kinds of instruments and have them be in the hands of musicians of the quality of So Percussion.

Don’t get me wrong. PLOrk is great – it’s a student ensemble with new students every year – so there’s only so much you can do. There’s a lot of turnover, and there’s only so much you can expect of them in terms of practicing and learning new music and new ways of working and so on. So this was kind of a “next level” or next thing for me to strive for. SO this was one of the first times I got to take those ideas from the laptop orchestra and put them to use in a piece for a professional ensemble.

So, are you in this piece yourself?

Only secondarily. It starts with this drop of a needle (which uses Ms. Pinky, by the way) and it’s got this faked antiqued recording of me playing a fiddle tune that was antiqued using a version of Luke DuBois’ old noise gate patch – you’d look at each bin in an FFT, and if the signal in any bin was above a certain level, you’d zero it out. I’d made into a reverse noise gate where you output the part you’d normally zero. I ran it on an old Brahms recording, which left me with just the noisy hiss, and added my fiddle tune – which I’d seriously bandpassed – to it. That was all done with Max, and it was really fun. So I’m present – three of the tracks start with these fake old recordings that were done that way. But I don’t play on the piece in performance at all. There are times – on and off – where I feel like I need to write more pieces in which I don’t play. So Percussion wanted a piece they could play without me, so that they could travel more with it. I wanted to write some more music where I wasn’t required there. But it’s kind of hard for me – I like being up there with people making music.

That’s not a very difficult idea for a Max person, is it? You’re invested in that software “instrument” you’ve made, and it’s only natural to want to be one of the ones up there enjoying interacting with it….

That’s right. The question of maintenance – being around if things overheat – is lots less of an issue now. Before, whenever I did electronic stuff, I was always there on stage playing. As a fiddler, I’m always up there playing. To try to be the “composer” and try to make a piece for somebody else has always been a little bit of an uncomfortable thing.

Is the rest of “Neither Anvil Nor Pulley” driven by similar ideas of time and rhythm and behavior? Do the other component parts reflect the idea that you have another different set of processes that you’re going to explore? What you’ve described so far has to do with developing and giving form to some simple ideas – the piece is what happens when those simple ideas become interactive processes. That said, where do the other bits come from?

One of my favorite pieces in this piece is actually at the track change from 1 to 2. Track 1 is a good old fiddle tune that I wrote. I just literally gave it to them – it’s a little tune with maybe a couple of counter-lines and some foot stomping patterns that I do when I would play the tune. I gave that to So Percussion and said, “Figure out how you’d like to play this.” The love that sort of stuff – using steel pans and vibraphone and all kinds of stuff. The tempo’s about 120 bpm, but it’s a fiddler/drum ensemble’s 120 bpm – the end of it’s got this four-on-the-floor thing, Jason’s just got it goin’ in the kick drum, and as soon as it ends, the 120 bpm clicks start for the metronomes in that second movement. There’s this crazy moment when you go from this really grooved 120 bpm to this absolutely solid electronic tempo… it’s like “Whoa. What just happened here?”

You just turned the swing algorithm off in real time….

Right [laughs]. That moment highlights one of the things I’m interested in with writing the piece. When I wrote this piece for them – it’s got laptops in it and all that – I just wanted it to be a piece that they would want to play. In my time with them before, the fiddle stuff was just always something we’d done. I remember at one point playing with Adam Sliwinski, who’s this great marimba player. Adam’s maybe the most “classical” guy in the group – he just loves to play Bach on marimba and work on phrasing. At that time, I had this one fiddle tune that had some notes in it in that old-fashioned style, and in rehearsal I could see that he was really getting into it, whereas a lot of the other pieces, he was just struggling with playing drum machines and doing all this weird counting. When it came to this piece, I felt like I wanted there to be more in it for Adam. So these other fiddle tunes in the piece just came out of that impetus – just wanting them to spend time playing the music and not having to wrestle with the technology and the ideas I had for the rest of the piece. As we were working on the piece, having those two things together going against one another really put in sharp focus the tensions that arise when people play with machines and how machines deal with time very differently than people do. In terms of the piece, I felt that it gave them more to do, and it gave them a way to play together that really contrasted to how I was asking them to play otherwise, and that actually made the piece more powerful and effective when you saw things juxtaposed that way.

What strikes me about this is that it seems so often that when composers or performers work with those ideas, they become the basis of a kind of polemic about one of those or the other – “human” swing vs. unforgiving machine time. At a certain point, we get ought to be able to move past the polemics of it, where it becomes merely a compositional choice you can make or not. I think there could or should be a lot more pieces out there that have those ideas in dialogue with each other in the presence of an audience.

Yeah – I do feel that way in the sense that when I’m writing pieces I’m pretty shameless about using everything at my disposal without the usual boundaries. This piece reflects that – I like to code things up and play with them, and if I find something that I find really compelling musically, I’m going to use it. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to have some fiddle tunes in there as well. I want to use whatever is at my disposal.

As an interviewer, this makes me happy – I hate those situations where it seems like I have to stop the conversation to ask, ‘How did you use X to do this?” It’d bug me to do what with any software. I much prefer talking about the software as a tool in your composing toolbox – even though the piece couldn’t exist without the technology, the technology isn’t the reason for it.

Right. Can I be brutally honest with you for a moment?

Sure.

The fact that I’m using Max in this piece at all is a bit of a recovery for me. I’d worked with Max for a really really long time, to the point where I really couldn’t stand working with it any more. The reason was that I’m a very capable Max programmer with very bad habits… I found I’d write Max programs that I couldn’t revisit a week later because I didn’t encapsulate soon enough. I’d have these messy, nasty patches – let alone going back a year or more to work I’d done before. So I had this sabbatical in 2007 where I thought, “I am either going to quit computer music completely, or I have to find some other place to work.” That’s when I started learning ChucK because we were using it in the laptop orchestra – Ge Wang had made it, in part, in the context of a laptop orchestra. Our students were learning it. So I figured I’d better learn it. And I loved it – in fact, my first major project was porting the munger~ object to ChucK. I spent three months trying to make ChucK work like Max, and then I realized that that wasn’t the point. And then a quarter to half way through the porting I realized, ‘Wait wait – at this point in the port I stop here. I don’t port any more – I give it this basic functionality, and then I work with the rest of it in this other way where – instead of building all this functionality into this object, I have something where that functionality is part of the programming process or environment. But I did go through this point where I didn’t want to see Max at all.

Well, thanks for being so polite, but I don’t think of that as particularly brutal thing to say – you’re talking about the personal process of finding where a tool works well for you and where it doesn’t. As someone who uses software, that’s a good thing and a choice you absolutely get to make for yourself. I’m happy when people use Max to make cool things, but I’m happier when the world fills with cool things of any kind

This was actually a positive experience for me. Over the last couple of years, there’s been this process of discovering the things about Max that I really DO like – this kind of toolbench model where it’s been most effective for me. I’ve rediscovered the things that Max is really really great at – for example, the spectral stuff. Max is really great at feature extraction – pitch and attack detection, things like that. Max is really really great for building musical interfaces that carry a lot of music information or interface with other devices. Max is really good at those things.

And teaching – I’m teaching a grad seminar right now – a grad seminar on comparative programming practices where we’re looking at Max and ChucK and Supercollider. At first, I was brutally honest about my feelings about working in these three environments, and then I had some great programmers come in to teach the students these three languages. Konrad Kaczmarek, who’s a really beautiful Max programmer, and someone like Jascha Narveson to teach Supercollider. And at the halfway mark when I asked them what they wanted to work on, they all wanted to work on Max. They all wanted me to show them PeRColate. The last couple of weeks I’ve been programming in front of them, building some things. And man…. Some things are just so much easier to do in Max than anywhere else! I built one whole thing in a week in the seminar with Max, and the next week I did it in ChucK, except that I got stuck because the documentation’s not nearly as good and I couldn’t find this call that I knew was there…. Eventually, after the class I went and hunted through the source code for ChucK in order to find the damn methods. And then I finally built it and told the students, “You know, for a lot of you, you really want to or have to learn some really old-fashioned programming to work in ChucK. You have to want to learn about functions and classes and things like that in a way that you just don’t have to when you’re learning Max. So I’m never NOT going to work with ChucK – at least I think I won’t – and it’s not like I’m going back to using Max exclusively….

You’re working in a multilingual environment. A multicultural environment too.

Well, it’s true. It’s also so that we have FRIENDS in those languages, too. I have a lot of Max friends. I think I only have a few Supercollider friends [laughs] Paul (Lansky) is a supercollider friend. And Jascha writes supercollider in way where I can actually read the code and make sense of it – he’s trying to write readable code rather than trying to impress me with the impenetrable concision of his code. But people are different, and they’re drawn to different things and they find their own ways.

For me that choice of path is interesting. And of course, it’s always interesting to know about the things that impeded progress, if you’re involved in creating software other people are going to use.

My issue with Supercollider and Max is basically the same – the large vocabulary is great for people who are programming in either language every day in the sense that you retain a familiarity with this huge library and what it does. I don’t program every day; I might spend a week programming intensely, and then go 6 months without doing any programming at all. For me, smaller vocabulary tends to be better. So I can write for loops and if statements in ChucK, If I need a pattern library, I can make it. That’s easier for me than trying to remain versed in the large library of possibilities. I do encounter this a little bit in Max, but Max is easy to work around this problem in – you can just option click “Oh, and there are all these other objects, too….” Even if I’m out of shape – and I do get out of shape with languages – it’s pretty quick to get back on the horse. “See also” makes such a big difference – it’s just boom-boom-boom. Oh. That’s right. I’ve gotten to where that’s how I do anything. I use something that’s sort of like what I want and then option click and hunt around until I find what I’m looking for.

Yeah. That’s one of the things we found with working with Max 6 – it’s some of what drove the development of autocomplete and the refpage stuff that supported it. The see also is part of the autocomplete now….

Yeah. It’s awesome.

Dan’s Website

So Percussion on SoundCloud

PLOrk, The Princeton Laptop Orchestra

My personal emulation of the famous Roland  tb 303 totally built using MAX. I added some simple effects like reverb (using the tool nw.gverb~), tape delay and a bit crusher for a chance to work more on the waveforms and to make the best performance. I made it to be used inside live set or music production. I used the Johannes Schmidt patch for midi learn. http://cycling74.com/toolbox/midi-learn/

This project provides an abstraction for the Launchpad for use inside M4L or Max. All midi/LOM communications are handled for you and a single entry point is provided for receiving updates from the LP and sending updates to the LP. Several modes are/will be supported for using the LP in different ways (e.g. standard, slider, drumpad) as well as providing basic nice-to-have processing (e.g. momentary toggle switches)