MC Movement Studies in the Package Manager

In this installment of exploring offerings from the Package Manager, we’ll be taking a quick look at the MC Movement Studies package, a collaboration between Cycling ‘74 and Dillon Bastan. I wanted to share this package because, for me, this package hits the sweet spots of being easy to learn from, fun to play with on its own, and useful fodder for my own patches.

Taken from Nature

The patches in MC Movement Studies are based on topics in Daniel Shiffman’s freely available book, The Nature of Code, on how to use concepts like gravity, magnetism, and randomness in artistic ways. (Dillon is also the author of the Inspired by Nature devices in Live 11, another show of endlessly fun patching based on natural phenomena.)

This package is structured as a set of examples, “studies,” which go from simple to complex ways of incorporating these concepts. Despite the name of the package, there’s more than just MC at work in the studies – there’s plenty to learn about jsui and visuals, too.

Learning by Example

Something I personally appreciate about this package is how easily each study can itself be studied.

For example, the db.mc.wavetable patch goes from a simple randomized wavetable example...

… to more complex ones.

As Easy or as Complicated as You Want

I also love that the patches are designed both to be playable “out-of-the-box” and to be taken apart and pulled into your own creations.

For example, the db.mc.simplevox centers around a db.mc.vox~ subpatcher just begging to be pulled into a crazy vocoder project yet remains a blast when used as-is.

Besides exploring the possibilities of MC, the MC studies package also contains a wealth of jsui interfaces and animations, like the launcher patch’s bouncing bubbles...

… the db.mc.particlegrains particle system interface...

… and the db.mc.magnetism magnetic bar display, to name a few.

With all that said, there's plenty more to check out in this package. Go ahead and check it out to see what inspires you most!