It's summer - time to plug something new into your headphones. Follow me as I dig into four podcasts that follow obsession into four completely different worlds.
Amazing things can happen when two people from different mediums come together to form a novel and highly expressive dialog. Video artist Nisa Karnsomport and sound experimentalist Ellen Phan have used their collaborative dialog to create a detailed yet highly commanding sensory performance. Ellen and Nisa took some time to provide insight into their collaborative and respective artistic backgrounds, influences, and live processes.
Learning Max on your own can be difficult, which is why we at Cycling 74 have created a vast collection of documentation that’s built into Max. However, if you open the Documentation window under Help > Reference it can still seem daunting and challenging to know where to start. This article will help demystify the built-in documentation so you can take full advantage of these resources.
I tend to be interested in a particular type of plug-in that strives for an easy-to-use UI and provides a range of great results rather than offering a billion possibilities. Sometimes, you just want to dial up a silky reverb or an interesting delay-based sound castle onstage with a minimum of Repetitive Stress Disorder. Here’s a quartet of plug-ins that do just that...
We're going to be looking at the documentation for Max 8 and some of the resources built into the Max application itself intended to aid you in your Max patching life. For the first article in this series, I'm going to start with a basic questions: When you go looking for answers using Max 8, what’s precisely being searched? where does Max 8 look in response to your queries? What can you do with the results?
I always look forward to Federico Foderaro’s inspiring Amazing Max Stuff videos as a source of enlightenment and inspiration. Federico was kind enough to sit down for a chat about where he came from, what he’s doing, and to provide some tips about learning Max.
This time out, our "Content You Need" feature includes our very first non-Package Manager-based collection - a brief introduction to the single most extensive and comprehensive package of Max/MSP-based compositions and Max patches/tools for analysis, algorithmic composition, and audio processing we’ve ever seen anywhere.
While I've known and enjoyed Tom Hall's music for several years, I've never been in the right place or time to see him perform in the flesh. Over that time, though, I've heard plenty of mentions of his interest in and work on the visual aspect of his performances. Tom was kind enough to take some time out from his Cycling '74 roles to talk about his life as an audiovisual performer.
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Thor Magnusson's Sonic Writing: Technologies of Material, Symbolic, and Signal Inscriptions is one of those rare reads that manages to connect, to clarify, and to serve as a great starting point for contemplation of our own practice in the present age. The book takes the thought-provoking approach of looking at some of the ways in which technology has always conditioned our musical expression, even as it modifies and redefines it.
