One of my favorite things about the Max community is how diverse and inter-disciplinary it is. Today I’m happy to introduce you to Tina Aufiero, Artistic Director at the Pilchuck Glass School. As a new media artist, glass artist, and educator, Tina has fostered a unique culture at Pilchuck by blending these worlds through curriculum design and careful curation of the Artist in Residency program.
My last post about recent Max-centric recordings got me thinking about a kind of Max-centric work that’s not available in recorded form nearly as often - works in which Max locates itself in between a player and an acoustic instrument in a live dialog. My personal favorite version of this playground involves the piano in its MIDI and Disklavier forms. Here’s a sampling of interesting works - I’m sure you have a few of your own to recommend, too.
The last several weeks have seen the release of a quartet of new recordings of interest to both seasoned and aspiring Max users - have a look, and a listen.
One of the interesting features of a book that manages to become “a standard work in the field” is that the things we refer to when we use a word like “standard” are subject to change. The appearance of new editions of “standard works” provides us with a chance to reflect on the ways in which editorial changes may mark changes in the practice the book describes. The recent revised edition Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner’s Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music has made a good book better....
Suzanne Thorpe and I had a chance to discuss her varied musical past. Ranging from co-founding the indie rock band Mercury Rev to working with the late Pauline Oliveros, her recent sound installation work that incorporates Max, and the arts education program for young female-identified women, TECHNE, which she co-founded with Bonnie Jones.
Reporting on the annual papers, performances and pyrotechnics that comprise the NIME conference is an exercise in making a kind of reduction sauce - in this case, boiling a rambunctious community of persons with the shared goal of imagining different forms for musical expression down into a manageable collection of images, words, and links.
As a big fan of filtered/massaged randomness as a way of generating and organizing variety, I've always got my eyes peeled for interesting new plug-ins. Here’s a new one that I’ve been enjoying quite a bit: PicSeq from the folks at encoderaudio.
I started using the Doepfer Pocket Dial and Fader back around 2000, and I’ve had a fondness for a good external controller ever since. The Midi Fighter Twister from DJTechTools is a great and flexible knob-based controller available: a 4 x 4 grid of customizable multimodal knobs with great action and feel that can provide a meaningful range of feedback with the built-in LEDs.
Our "On the Road" features are often after-the-fact reports on something amazing. This time out, I'd like to look ahead to the Currents New Media Festival, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico - and maybe give you a chance to attend! It's one of my favorite media festivals in the world, and well worth your time.
When a package gets 4000 downloads, we know it’s hit a nerve. When it is something as serious as machine learning, we also know that it must provide a great interface to an interesting technology. Benjamin Day Smith has followed his initial ml.star release with an update that includes enhancements, bug fixes and a few new objects.
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