tutorials

This series of tutorials first appeared on my CreativeSynth.com website between 2001 and 2002. Due to their popularity (especially amongst new Max users), I have moved them to the Cycling74.com website. Read the introduction.

Sorry for the long delay - the real world has a way of getting out-of-hand. Nevertheless, we shall continue...

In our last article, we beefed up our basic synth by adding volume control using an A/R envelope. Now that we have some control over the basic amplitude, it's time to move onto filtering.

This series of tutorials first appeared on my CreativeSynth.com website between 2001 and 2002. Due to their popularity (especially amongst new Max users), I have moved them to the Cycling74.com website. Read the introduction.

In the last article, we created a simple synthesizer using basic Max and MSP objects. The biggest problem with that synth was the last ov output control - and an annoying thump in the output whenever a new key was struck. In this, the second article, we will correct some of these problems - and open some new doors.

This series of tutorials first appeared on my CreativeSynth.com website between 2001 and 2002. Due to their popularity (especially amongst new Max users), I have moved them to the Cycling74.com website. Read the introduction.

I've been using Cycling 74's Max software since 1992 or 1993 (it was Opcode's at the time), and jumped on-board with their MSP software as soon as it was available. Most of the last 8-or-so years was spent reworking some step-sequencers and routers that are important for my music work. However, with recent upgrades to my computers, and a new G4 laptop, I've gotten more heavily into synth building.

by Richard Dudas and Cort Lippe

Introduction

In our last article about the phase vocoder we saw how to create a basic phase vocoder for time-stretching. While it is by no means a simple MSP patch, it is a useful one. In addition to time-stretching, the phase vocoder has been used for transposition and "freeze" effects, which we will be discussing in this article. If you are unfamiliar with the phase vocoder principle, we suggest you review Part I of this series of articles. Additionally, if you are unfamiliar with Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) you may wish to familiarize yourself with MSP Tutorials 25 and 26 (about fft~ and pfft~, respectively) in the Users Manual.

Typically, when I talk to Jitter users about writing one's own shader programs for use with jit.gl.slab, I usually get glazed-over eyes and this sort of distant look of wonder. When I try to explain how easy it is, that look typically turns to one of annoyed disbelief. So, for a long time now I've been thinking about writing an article to de-mystify the process of writing your own GLSL shaders, and to help everyone avoid some common frustrations.

Creating Your Own Interface

In the previous installments, I've tried to give you a quick hands-on feel for how radiaL operates, paying particular attention to how you can develop a feel for radiaL's nonlinear playback modes by listening. But I think that the place where radiaL really shines as an instrument rather than enjoyable way to do multi-channel loop manipulation involves the addition of an interface -- connecting radiaL to an external controller in a way that turns your favorite parameter changes into physical/gestural activities. In radiaL, the files that describe the relationship between parameters and an external controller is called a control template.

Written by Brad Garton

This is perhaps an unusual article for Cycling '74 to put on their web site, because it has to do with all the languages that Max/MSP isn't. I have to confess that I'm not really a very good Max-user. I know only a handful of objects, and I am of the text-based generation that is still a little, um, "graphical-user-interface-challenged". I basically use Max/MSP only as a window onto computer music languages that I am adept at using. More and more, though, I am also using Max as base platform for connecting these languages to each other. One of the really great decisions that the Cycling '74 design team made was to make the development and integration of external objects relatively easy. This has been a real boost for the classes that I teach at Columbia University, and it has also allowed me much more creative freedom in my compositional work.

An informal guide to some bonus externs and some patching and building techniques.

Max is all about making connections. The Making Connections series of tutorials will introduce you to new connections you can make between MaxMSP and the outside world. This tutorial, the first in the series, will discuss the use of HID devices such as USB game controllers as gestural interfaces for your Max patches.

In our last installment, I tried to present some really simple and (I hope) explanatory samples of some of the easiest ways to generate and organize variety on the fly using radiaL. One of the things that those examples did that I didn't talk very explicitly about involved loading a single loop on multiple channels and then using radiaL's ability to playback sections of that loop in a nonlinear fashion to create evolving structures. In the interests of "ear training," I suggested that you mute some of the loop channels as you went along in order for some parameter to be easier to hear, but it's my hope you just turned all the channels on and listened to them run when you were done following my instructions. Just in case you didn't, I've included another loop constructed so that you can generate varying patterns by loading it on multiple channels and then playing varying sections of the loop with different pitch/time grid and transposition settings. It's called "moogphrase.aif" Perhaps a little play with this is a good warm-up to what we're going to look at next. Download the materials here.

Written by Arne Eigenfeldt

One of the beauties of Max is its simplicity: the ability to quickly create a patch that does something artistically interesting. Part of this has to do with its visual programming style - patchcords allow us to see the relationship between graphic objects. However, unless you limit yourself to creating only straightforward patches, your patch can become a spaghetti-like series of connections that confound attempts at debugging.

Please note: This article was written for Max 4.6 originally.

I've been asked to write a couple of articles that discuss how I learned radiaL, and how I approach using it in a live performance setting -- both as a soloist and in an ensemble setting. While there are a good number of people out there who use radiaL, I'm surprised to discover that there are not nearly as many people who do what I do -- namely, to walk out on a stage, launch the program, and start improvising. While it seems a perfectly natural thing to do from my point of view, it may not necessarily be clear how I learned radiaL and came to my current performance practice (In addition to Voiceband Jilt, my release for c74 records, you can also find some downloadable examples of my work on my downloads page and some online release material from the label Palace of Lights).

Introduction

In this second installment of the ReWire Essentials series, we are going to look at hosting ReWire client applications. Clients route their information to the host (or mixer) application through the ReWire mechanism, and using Max/MSP as a host gives us options to have some fun with both the playback and output of the connected application.

The basic connection strategy for hosting ReWire clients involves the rewire~ object. This object gives us the means to select a ReWire client, use the available audio outputs and control the connected devices transport controls.

Written by Richard Dudas and Cort Lippe

Introduction

The phase vocoder is a tool used to perform time-stretching and pitch-shifting on recorded sounds. Its name derives from the early "vocoders" (contraction from "voice encoders"), which used a set of bandpass filters in parallel over many frequency bands, to crudely analyze and reconstruct speech. The infamous hardware vocoders of the 1960s and 1970s (as used, for example, by Wendy Carlos in the soundtrack of Kubrick's film "A Clockwork Orange") were based on this technology, and allowed the spectrum of one sound (in the Carlos example a synthesizer) to be controlled by that of another (a voice). In the Max/MSP examples folder, there is an example by Marcel Wierckx called "classic_vocoder.pat" (located in the "effects" sub-folder) which shows how this traditional vocoder works. Unlike the classic vocoder, which is based on bandpass filters, the phase vocoder is based on a Short-Term Fourier Transform (STFT) – a Fourier Transform performed sequentially on short segments of a longer sound – and in practical use has little to do with the hardware vocoders of the 1960s and 1970s. The phase vocoder can, however, be considered a type of vocoder because the Fourier Transform returns a set of amplitude values for a set of frequency bands spaced evenly across the sound's spectrum, similar to the older vocoder's set of bandpass filters. Of course the phase vocoder, as it's name suggests, not only takes into account the amplitude of these frequency bands, but also the phase of each band.

Introduction

So you want to move data between two or more computers in real time. It could be just a little data, such as individual Max messages sparsely distributed in time, or a lot of data, such as a stream of matrices or one or more audio channels. How do you do it?

Networking is a sometimes confusing world. There are many networking options built into Max, and this article will endeavour to make clear which option is best for your application.