Cycling '74's First Software User Conference
AES • San Francisco, CA • October 2, 2008--Cycling '74 today announced that its first user conference, Expo '74, will be held in San Francisco next April. The conference will include presentations, installations, workshops, and collaborative events covering the company's Max/MSP/Jitter software. Details will be outlined on the conference web site (expo74.net) in the coming months.
I'm pleased to announce that Cycling '74 will be hosting its first user conference next year, Expo '74. The conference will run three days from April 22-24, 2009 and will be held at the new (and intensely colored) Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. I'd like to tell you why we decided to put on this event and what you can expect to happen if you attend.
Now that I've got a nice generative patch and a way to hear it, I thought it'd be nice to make a few improvements and extensions that would let me begin to specify larger structures - to generate instructions to my generative patch, as it were. While I'm sure that the world is full of people who want ways to have the same thing happen again and again, I'd like to do this in ways that offer a little more freedom than that. This short tutorial will add a modest number of these kinds of changes.
I'm always curious about how someone's physical relationship with a guitar goes from the usual strumming to what some people call "tabletop guitar" - it seems like everyone has a different story about that. How'd it happen for you?
It was a gradual process - an acquired taste. I started with Rock music and classical guitar in the 70s, and played all sorts of Jazz in the 80s. After that I made a transition to music heavily influenced by the British Improvisers style.
Those of you who are paying close attention already know that Max 5 includes a database that manages all the files in the search path and makes handy things like the File Browser possible. To enable this functionality, we wrote an SQLite object to do all the important work under the hood. However, the SQLite object in Max isn't really something that you can type into an object box, and it doesn't come with any help files or documentation. In this article, we'll look at ways to interface with this mysterious "no box" object using JavaScript, so that you can build, query, and edit your own databases in Max.
In the last article, we did a lot of setup - we got input/output handling in place, and added a compressor to the processing chain as an example of an “effect module”. In this article, we will continue adding effects, including a dual overdrive module and a three-stage EQ/Filter module. With these additions we will further explore Max 5’s user interface options, as well as taking a look at some of the “tweaks” that make Max/MSP functions a little more guitar-faithful.
Last week, Siggraph 2008 took over the Los Angeles Convention Center, and Cycling '74 was there to bravely represent Jitter to a huge crowd of CG enthusiasts, production professionals, and academics. For anyone who hasn't been to a Siggraph show, it is a huge, over-stimulating event for the computer graphics community, complete with academic talks, screenings, an exhibition hall, an art show, competitions, and a job fair.
Recently, CNMAT at UC Berkeley held their annual MaxMSP/Jitter summer school classes at their beautiful Arch St. facility just off the UC campus. This year, for the second year in a row, I had the pleasure of teaching the Jitter Night School - a 3-night intensive of focussed tutorials covering a variety of Jitter topics.
Last time out, we created the LFOur, a generative patch composed of a quartet of synchronized LFOs whose output we can use to make noise. While it's interesting to watch how the different LFO configurations make combinatoric waveforms and it's restful and instructive to watch the sliders flick and rock, it would be nice to have something to connect it to. This tutorial includes some patches that will do just that.
As we were preparing Max 5, we strove to make things as pleasurable for every user as we could. One of the ways we did this was to permit the customization of the way Max looks and acts, so users could adjust their experience to individual tastes and needs. In addition to an unprecedented number of configurable settings, Max 5 also provides a more navigable structure for making choices about your environment. In this article we'll discuss ways you can tweak the settings in various places to make your time spent in Max 5 more comfortable and fulfilling to your aesthetic requirements.
In an earlier article, Andrew Benson and Ben Bracken went through the process of connecting a guitar to a Max-based processing system, and creating a few guitar-oriented effects patches. In this series of articles, I will be building a Max-based guitar processing "rig", and will give you the opportunity to look over my shoulder as I design and implement this system.
As a Max programmer, I spend quite a lot of time making patches that some people might find a little odd; rather than a large "instrument" that I toil over at great length or "the patch is the piece" outings, I love to make Max patches that don't make any noise or play any movies or create OpenGL scenes. Instead, I make things that are generative - working from the idea that Max is really just about messages, numbers, and lists and how you move them about; I love creating ways of generating and organizing variety, and then exploring what those generative structures do when hooked up to audio or video or other outputs.
When we left off in the last article, we had created a new color scheme and layout for our old patcher using presentation mode, translucency, improved color controls, and embedded hints. We could certainly leave this patch alone, but we're going to take the interface to another level, making it a little more interactive and interesting, while providing more intuitive controls. The techniques discussed here should open the door to much more fun and useful interface designs for your patches.
A common concern for many advanced Max users is the ability to load new sound modules into a running MSP patch without causing discontinuities in the sound. Many people worked around this by creating Pluggo plug-ins of their sound modules that could be loaded dynamically inside the vst~ object without breaking up the signal in the main patch. Another feature of the Pluggo engine was that it automatically generated the handy "egg-slider" GUI from the parameters specified in the patch. As exporting plug-ins is not currently available for Max 5, we will look at another alternative in this article based on a new feature of the poly~ object, which allows you to dynamically load new abstractions without recompiling the DSP. To help users explore this new alternative, we will demonstrate different ways to convert a Pluggo-ready patch made with MaxMSP 4.6 into a patch that you can load as a poly~ abstraction. Using the scripting capabilities of MaxMSP, we will also see how to automatically generate a Graphical User Interface for the newly converted poly~ abstraction. As this is a fairly advanced tutorial, you may need to consult the documentation browser for more details about the concepts and techniques involved.