It’s always fascinating to find out where and how an artist begins. Sound artist and performer Jessica Ekomane was kind enough to sit down for a chat about her origins, her processes, and her enthusiasms.
Here's a look at composer Ashley Fure's 2017 composition Anima, for augmented string quartet.
One of the historical issues that has affected Max programming was the separation of systems that used to exist: if you wanted to work on visuals, you would purchase Jitter, while audio people would focus on a purchase of MSP. While that’s all changed, those divisions persist, along with the notion that Jitter is only useful for visual media. Let me introduce you to a website dedicated to changing your mind about that.
We usually think of “design” as a combination of constraint and creativity. Above and beyond that, how do designers capture the time and the place in which they create? Can a geolocal design ethos exist? It’s a tempting question for anyone who uses Max. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “Designed in California” provides some interesting ways to think about the question.
A relative lull in Package Manager activity this month gives me a golden opportunity to share a hidden treasure with you tucked away inside the jit.mo package: The jit.mo.time object. In its “function” mode, it provides an efficient drop-in replacement for all those cycle~ and snapshot~ instances you might have scattered around your patches.
Instead of looking at a new device or two this time, I am going to focus on something that we’ve touched on in past articles and blog posts: the Max for Live Building Tools Pack. This is an encyclopedic set of patches that provide an introduction into Max for Live programming, and much more.
Recently, I was honored to be invited to perform at the inaugural MOXsonic at the University of Central Missouri. The festival itself was diversely programmed. As opposed to some heavy-handed curatorial voice demanding fealty from performers and audiences to some kind of overarching concept, the program seemed to say “show us all the possibilities....”
Ever have one of those evenings when checking out a new audio device involves checking out of what you’d had planned for a few glorious hours? Here’s my last version of that - a set of fun MFL devices from the folks at the pATCHES.zone website that open up new ways for create interesting tracks.
This Package Manager release brings a collection of highly practical Max abstractions from McGill University's IDMIL, designed with music and digital orchestra projects in mind. They’re elegant and resourceful examples of practical, real-world patching that - by virtue of being abstractions - ensure easy cross-platform use.
In the course of a piece on generative music I recently wrote for the Cycling '74 newsletter, I had occasion to mention Brian Eno's name in passing which resulted in the usual “Hey. Where can I find out more about this Eno stuff, anyway?” email from a reader. As it happens, Mr. Eno’s work has sets my bibliophile completist nerd bit high for quite a while, so this seemed a great time to provide a short guide to the discerning Enophile’s bookshelf. Read on!
