¡Feliz cumpleaños, CMMAS!

Photo: CMMAS

Last week I made the trip to Morelia in Mexico. Morelia is an amazing old town, the city center looks like it was transplanted from 17th century Europe - which, of course, it pretty much was.

I went there with my colleague Rob Ramirez as a guest of CMMAS for the occasion of their 10th birthday and the 12th Visiones Sonoras Festival. We have been working with CMMAS professor, Max expert and all around good guy Francisco Colasanto on the Spanish translation of Max now for a year or so and this was the first time we got to meet in person.

Check out the Spanish Max Store.

CMMAS is a busy bunch - a Latin American center for research, experimentation and the development of new sound projects (Residencies, anyone?), as well as a clearing house for information. Just in case you've been living in a cave somewhere, there's a rich history of electroacoustic music in Latin America (for more on this, visit Ricardo dal Farra's website on the subject), and CMMAS has released a couple of really interesting recordings, too - the Autoctofonías series of CDs of computer music that foregrounds local musical traditions and materials (Volume 1, Volume 2, and Volume 3 are available through CD Baby), along with a cool series produced along with Ricardo dal Farra that spotlights the history of electroacoustic music in Latin America (Volume 1, Volume 2, and Volume 3 are also on CD Baby). Check 'em out.

For Visiones Sonoras, Rob and I each gave a talk on Max.

Here I am showing how you can make one of Icaro Ferre’s awesome CV gen patchers play in a Link session. You can find Icaro’s code in the Package Manager - look for “Gen CV Tools” by Spektro.

Rob’s talk was a great introduction to Jitter techniques and resources.

Incidentally, you can find all of Rob’s Jitter resources from his talk here.

The big thing at the festival was modular synthesis. I was blown away by the amount of extremely high quality DIY work being done and the amazing sound art being produced. Here's a shot from one of the sets - Javier Lara in performance.

This was our first time participating in Visiones Sonoras and I’m quite sure it won’t be our last. We had a blast hanging out and meeting people in the excellent facilities at the Campus UNAM in Morelia. Definitely a great stop on the festival circuit.

Maybe we’ll see you there next year!