Sketches From A Cycling Life

To accompany the announcement of our recent acquisition, David Z. asked a number of Cycling '74 employees - past and present - to say a few things about their first encounters with Max and their experiences working with Cycling '74. They sat and thought, wrote some of the stories down, sent 'em off, and then got back to work. Here - in alphabetical rather than temporal order - are some of them for you.

Andrew Benson:

I was hired by Cycling '74 directly out of art school in 2005 to do on-site support in the San Francisco office in SOMA, off 4th. All of my previous employment was coffee shops, artist assistant gigs, and student computer jobs at SFAI. I was hired at the time because nobody else at Cycling '74 besides Joshua really understood how to use Jitter then. That meant part of my job was to quickly learn as much as I could about Jitter and figure out how convey that knowledge to the world. This was right before all the good OpenGL/GLSL features were added to Jitter, as well as Javascript support- so I was also tasked with learning GLSL and Javascript as quickly as I could. I hadn't done any text programming at this point, but Joshua memorably told me, "If you can understand Jitter, Javascript should be no problem for you." This sort of set the tone of my employment at Cycling '74, with me being perpetually assigned the task of figuring out how to be creative with the new stuff. Shortly after I started, we began selling Lemurs, and I was nominated to be the Lemur geek of North America. That meant getting trained on how to repair them by a nice French guy, and going around to different people and doing product demos. The most hilarious of these demos was definitely visiting Duran Duran at Andre Agassi's mansion. Especially in those early years, my co-workers were a hard-partying family of over-achievers, and I found myself at many points quickly out of my depth, either in drinks, or in deep discussions of the Max kernel. There is always someone in the room who is smarter than me and someone more capable of getting wild at the club, which has really challenged me to achieve more in both areas.

Joshua Kit Clayton:

First memories: In the fall of 1998, I remember standing out front of a tiny little nightclub on 16th/Capp in San Francisco for some friends' weekly techno party "Static" sharing a cigarette, when I first heard about Cycling '74. A friend of mine who worked at Opcode mentioned an exciting new piece of modular synthesis software called MSP, and suggested I check it out. I had seen Max in college in the electronic music studio, but never used it. At that time, I had more experience with somewhat similar platforms for computer music like FORTH-based formula and HMSL, Music V variants like Cmusic and Csound, and Symbolic Sound's Kyma system. To be able to do these sorts of things in real time on the CPU with MSP was a big advantage over either being non-realtime or needing dedicated hardware.

At the same time I downloaded the application, I also downloaded the SDKs for both Max and MSP. As I was learning Max and MSP, I would make any additional objects I needed that happened to be missing from the object set. The first objects I made were simple tools like an audio rate modulo, bit depth reduction, and audio signal-triggered sample and hold objects. After a few months of playing around with Max/MSP, I sent David a resume together with my externals' source code despite there having been no formal job posting. I remember coming into a tiny little office on Folsom street and grabbing lunch at Brainwash cafe for an interview. Amazingly, I convinced them to hire me. I think it was mainly the fact that I had a little bit of windows programming experience and lots of youthful enthusiasm that got me hired, as the first projects I worked on were related to Windows. One was a cross-platform CD and media player that never was released, though it was the original inspiration for the name soundflower (the UI was an image of a sunflower). The other was the Max Windows port. My involvement with both of these projects kind of fizzled out in different ways over time, as I ended up doing more MSP external development and the Windows port went through several failed attempts, churning through as many programmers. At this point, development mainly consisted on emailing StuffIt archives back and forth with David, who was our human source control system. I remember some long pair-programming sessions where we would step through code in parallel while on the phone for hours describing what we were experiencing. It's amazing to think back on how primitive our development toolchain was back in those days, and how far it has come. It's equally amazing to think about how much we've all learned and grown together as engineers, as a business, and as friends over the past 20 years - and looking forward to the next 20 to come.

John Christopher Dobrian:

I talked with David Zicarelli long distance on the phone nearly every day for six weeks before I met him in person. Turns out he’s taller than he sounds. The year was 1990, he was the sole programmer of the product that was soon to be released as Max, and I had been hired to document how it worked. During that time, he and I discussed every detail of the program and how best to explain it to new users. I continued doing the documentation for subsequent versions of Max for the next several years, and in 1997 when David founded Cycling ’74 he hired me to write the manual and tutorials for Cycling’s first product, the Max audio extensions called MSP.

More than being just a freelance writing gig, that documentation work was always terrific fun for me because of the time I got to spend batting around ideas with David. I enjoyed being involved in his development process, learning how he thought about the structure and usages of Max. Being required to explain Max programming in clear prose deepened my own understanding and, I hope, made me a better teacher.

With the exception of a brief return to co-write the Jitter Tutorials, I faded out of the Max manual biz and Gregory Taylor took over that role. Cycling '74 continued to list me as a consultant on their company website for a while, although at that point I was really just an occasional contributor of the odd utility Max object and an annoying kibitzer on the company listserv. I still very much enjoy schmoozing with Cycling colleagues whenever we meet up, and since I’m an incorrigible pedant whose idea of a good time is to hack up a quick example in answer to someone’s question on a user forum, I’m still hanging around virtually.

Luke DuBois:

I met David Z in 1999 at a computer music workshop attached to the June in Buffalo festival, my first year of graduate school.  I had started using Max maybe a year earlier, when Meg Schedel showed me MSP.  The Buchla and Serge modular synthesizers I was using on recordings were becoming too much to take along when we were on tour, and I thought it might be a good idea if I switched to a Powerbook.  I was getting pretty good at it.  I remember David demoing Pluggo, and me showing him a really early version of the weird sequencer software I had been building to emulate some of my Buchla patches.  The last day of the festival I asked him for a summer job, which made him smile and kind of laugh.  He said he'd think about it.

We exchanged some e-mail at some point about PeRColate, and about doing some work for the company.  He knew that I did a lot of work with image and video processing, but it's a bit unclear to me if I ever sent him a resumé, or even any patches.  

Somewhere in there (and I don't remember when), Joshua Kit Clayton came to New York to play a show at Tonic as part of a SoundLab event.  He left his laptop in a taxi, and I loaned him mine.  He sat a the Columbia CMC for four hours downloading all his patches over our Internet connection from California, and we talked.  I thought he was totally fucking brilliant, and really hilarious, political, and dark; I remember having a funny feeling in the back of my brain that we were going to know each other for the rest of our lives.

The autumn of 2000 I did an artist residency with Mark McNamara at STEIM followed by a trip to the ICMC in Berlin.  I remember hanging out in Berlin with Jeremy Bernstein (who I knew from the New York live visualist community) and Gregory Taylor (who I'd known for years mainly as a regular visitor to the CMC), and having a lot of fun talking to them about what was happening with the company, the evolving state of the Max documentation, what the Titanium Mac laptops (the G4 chip) meant for real-time video, etc.  

Around 3am on a Friday in November of 2000, I received an e-mail from Joshua in which he said he needed to talk to me about some video stuff he was working on that David said I might be interested in – so I was in the band.  I remember thinking I was working with the coolest people, on the coolest software, on all of planet Earth.

After the new year, I received another e-mail, this time from a different mailing list:

This marks the beginning of a group discussion on a project called jit.jit is the name of one of my cats. He has only half a tail. I have no idea if this will be name of the final product(s), but will use it as a working name unless anyone objects. Deciding on a name will be part of our discussion. … jit will be an architecture for generating and processing datasets which lend themselves to a matrix representation. A significant focus will be on rasterized image/video, and 2D/3D vector graphics, however, jit will not be limited to these applications….

And that was how I learned what my job would be.

I think my favorite thing about Cycling'74 was that I always felt it had an incredibly open, non-hierarchical culture.  I'm told this is a standard aspirational goal for any and all tech companies.  I'm also told that what this usually means is that the boss wears flip-flops and sits out in an open plan floor; you're allowed to beat him at Nerf basketball, but if you trash his code you still get fired.

Cycling'74 really did feel open, and friendly, and free from rules and full of ideas.  The entire company was (and still is) subscribed to a company-wide, freeform e-mail list in which everything and anything is discussed, and it had an incredibly high signal-to-noise ratio, because everyone was so positive, and excited, and aware that they were a bunch of amazing people creating a tool by which an entirely different set of amazing people were going to make some amazing work.

Imagine working on a word processing program day in, day out, fixing bugs and adding features.  Think how, from the outside, that could seem to be not the sexiest job in software engineering.  Now imagine if I guaranteed you that every single user of your program was or was going to be a best-selling author.  That's what working on Max was like.

I would work alone in my office up at the Columbia CMC.  I was three hours ahead of California, which meant I could work really late into the night and still get Joshua or David on the phone if I broke something, or needed help.  Jeremy Bernstein (the other New Yorker at the time) and I would hang out on weekends and code nonstop.

Everyone at the company was incredibly empowering, with the default order being to work on what you were most excited about.  In addition, one of the core values of Max - that data was best treated as neutral and therefore interchangeable, and mappable, and scalable - spilled out into the ways in which the engineering teams were allowed to explore what was possible with the architecture we were developing.  I don't think a different software company would have let me spend weeks on Lindenmayer system implementations and Conway's game of life algorithms as a way to show how Jitter was a data neutral engine that could work with information symbolically, and that the 'cells' in the matrix architecture were much more than pixels in an image.

The company get-togethers, the trade shows, and the Expo'74 events really made me feel like I had, as David once put it to me, "a crazy awesome extended family in San Francisco."  I would fly home after NAMM or SIGGRAPH or meetings in San Francisco thinking how lucky I was to know everyone.  My life is very different now, and the 25 year old version of me is someone I don't see much any more, but I'm incredibly honored and very lucky that he was picked to work on their team.

Richard Dudas:

I was first involved with Cycling ’74 as an alpha- and beta-tester for the very first version of MSP - that’s actually several months before Cycling was formally registered as a company! I’d already been a beta-tester for Max 3.5, which David Zicarelli had been single-handedly working on for Opcode Inc., and, as I was working at IRCAM in Paris at the time, I already had quite a bit of experience with Miller Puckette’s real-time audio patching system on the NeXT computer, which was known as Max-FTS. So, I guess I was an ideal candidate to evaluate that first version of MSP and give critical feedback about it while it was being developed. I still vividly remember the night I downloaded the very first version to test out… it was very exciting to be able to finally process real-time audio on my home computer using my familiar old friend Max! From today’s perspective this might seem uneventful, but at the time it really seemed to usher in a big change from institutional studio to home studio: until that night, real-time digital audio processing was a luxury of being affiliated with a big studio with powerful (and expensive) computers and external hardware, from that night onward, such power now seemed to belong to the composers and musicians, themselves.

Nonetheless, upon returning to the USA a year or so later to return to graduate school, I became an actual part of the first C74 team. My first project with C74 was actually not directly related to music or programming: it was a graphic design project to create the packaging for “Pluggo! - the Never-Ending Plug-In”. I had already had some graphic design experience in the past while working for Amiata Records, an indie label in Italy, and just after I got back to the US, Cycling ’74 needed some kind of lighthearted and fun logo and packaging design for their new set of Max-based VST plugins, so creating a cartoon character named “Mr. Pluggo” seemed like a logical place to start! The overall packaging and look really was a collaboration between Lilli Wessling Hart, David Z. and myself - although I did create the cartoon character and realized a lot of the grunt-work of the layout, I couldn’t have gotten it all done without a lot of help and input from them. Around that time, Cycling ’74 also began exhibiting at trade shows like the NAMM and AES, so we all got together at David's house to design and construct some unique and fun trade show booths using PVC pipes, chalk boards and various other items (we even had a yurt one year) all of which was really very, very…. nay, extremely unorthodox at those kind of shows! As you can imagine, our booth was always a point of interest and topic of discussion, and I think its unconventional and unexpected style from year to year says a lot about the people who work for Cycling ’74, both then and now - always imagining creatively and always eager to not simply think outside the box but also actually venture outside it, too!

Anyway, our first serious Max/MSP-related task, after Cycling had officially purchased Max from Opcode, was to work on the Max 4 upgrade, which more closely integrated MSP into the Max environment and included a lot of new musical-oriented tools for both message and audio processing, as well as some additional graphical items to make patches look nicer. It was a big upgrade, as was the next one (Max 4.5) and I am proud to say I played a part both of them. My biggest contributions to the 4.0 update were the filtergraph~, and pfft~ objects (the former with considerable mathematical help from Stefania Serafin), although I did a lot of other things on a more graphical side, such as a complete redesign of the lcd object from the ground up as well as creating basic stuff like the panel object (just a colored rectangle to put in the background of patches to make them prettier) and nslider (note-slider – a musical notation counterpart to the kslider/keyboard-slider), among others. I feel my greatest contribution to Max/MSP around that time was the gizmo~ object for real-time transposition, released with Max 4.5. For me as a composer and computer musician, that felt like locating the final missing piece of the puzzle and putting in its place where Max's musical functionality was concerned, and consequently that also marks the moment in time from when I actually started using Max/MSP for my own music (gizmo~ was basically created to realize my "Prelude No. 1 for Flute and Computer”), instead of just making a lot of simple (or not-so-simple!) audio example patches for fun.

So, speaking for myself as a Cycling ’74 developer, I can say that the tools I created for the Max/MSP environment were all designed from a musicianʼs viewpoint, in order to address musical, pedagogical and interface shortcomings which I sensed within earlier versions of the program. I think I can probably also safely extend that to the other Cycling developers, old and new - it’s always been a group of people who have been first and foremost users and “fans” of the software – as I was and still am – thus, consequently, each person involved with Cycling ’74 has created and improved those things which seem most important from their own creative musical perspective. I think that’s what makes the software so special!

Darwin Grosse:

While I'd been using Max since 1994, and was a long-time follower of the Max mail lists, it wasn't until 2000 that I had my first direct interaction with Cycling '74. I'd already been writing for music magazines for a while, and had also been working for Native Instruments. But I always had a place in my heart for what David and his Cycling team were up to.

When a call came out for plug-in testers, I rushed to sign up. What resulted was the Pluggo package being dropped on my Mac, and me test driving it within Studio Vision and Metro. I would construct long run-through documents, with bullet-pointed issue lists and feature requests. One of the latter ended up giving me some notoriety among the development team: I wanted presets to have meaningful names, but the plug-ins were delivered with default names like "Default Preset #2". So, whenever I would see this in a plug-in, I would write up a feature request that simply said "CRAP PRESETS" (all caps, of course).

This caught everyone's attention - especially after the second or third round of testing - when I was obviously not going to go away. I prevailed, but not before Gregory Taylor dubbed me "Dr. CRAP PRESETS" as my working name. Eventually I joined the Cycling team, got involved in making my own CRAP PRESETS, and have been provided an amazing work experience ever since.

Lilli Wessling Hart:

From the day I started working with David selling MSP in late-1997, it was obvious the customers had trust in and often familiarity with David and his work. From my perspective as one of two people who interacted with the customers -- David being the other -- this set the tone for many years to come.

Another positive thing about Max and its existing history was that we had no shortage of talented and knowledgable people who wanted to get involved with the company -- some of whom started as our customers. By the end of 1999, our small team had grown with the addition of Gregory Taylor, Joshua Kit Clayton, Marsha Vdovin, Richard Dudas, Les Stuck, jhno and Christopher Dobrian -- all of whom still have a special working relationship or friendship with us.

Professionally, David found interesting ways to challenge me throughout our time working together. Whether it was designing a software box we had never seen before (not that it hadn't been done before) like radiaL's "vinyl" CD or creating a unique experience at a trade show like the PVC pipe booth and the yurt, we may not have done it perfectly but we learned a lot from each experience and had a lot of fun doing it. (<- It may be that patching in Max could be described in a similar way.)

jhno:

In 1998, MSP audio support for Max was the most exciting thing going in computer music. So I was stoked when David Z. hired me to develop software for his new company. But what to do next? We used to sit around and think of crazy things we could make - like abusing CD’s and playlists. Around this time, David realized he could make the Max/MSP runtime work inside a VST plug-in. Then writing a plug-in would be as easy as writing a Max patch! This was a radical idea at the time. We put a ridiculous amount of work into the project. It was an amazing experience to be able to dream up and create really off-the-wall ideas, and then release them for musicians to use in their existing production environment.

Later on we decided to start another experiment and see if a Max patch could be refined, packaged, and sold as a standalone software product. It wasn’t easy. Ironically enough, we announced that product - a live, loop-based performance tool called radiaL - at the same tradeshow that another brand-new company was announcing their first product: a live, loop-based performance tool called Live. They were both based on real musicians’ Max patches…! Little did we know that Live would rise up, take over the world, and one day become the perfect environment to create plug-ins with Max.

Ben Nevile:

I think I first learned about Max in 1997, through a class I took with Andy Schloss. Max immediately made sense to me. 

One day in 1999 on the Cycling ’74 email list, David said something like “the labor market in San Francisco is crazy. We welcome resumes from anyone who is interested in our work.” So, I wrote him an email. 

I was working at that time as a writer in Vancouver. David introduced me to Gregory Taylor, who had interviews with various Max luminaries in the can. My first contribution was to edit these interviews for publication on the website.

I puttered along contributing some writing here and there, watching from afar as pluggo was being built. I remember flying down to San Francisco to meet the gang. The office was tiny. I met David, Lilli, Joshua, Gregory, and even by chance Jill, who at that point wasn’t working for the company. I already knew Matthew through music. Joshua had his laptop, and sat on the floor demonstrating to David some new MSP work he’d finished. Lilli was clearly the person holding the operation together.

I bought Kernighan and Ritchie, and moved through many roles in the company - Cycling gave me the chance to cut my teeth in programming, signal processing, interface design, shaders… all of it super cool. But what really motivated me the most was the feeling of being a part of such a remarkable team. I am so lucky.

Rob Sussman:

Early in 2003, I was living in Capitola, CA, winding down a startup, and ready for a new gig. As luck would have it, Cycling was looking for someone to help complete the port of Max to Windows. When David hired me he failed to mention the prior unsuccessful efforts at a port which almost convinced him it would not be possible. Thankfully, things came together with a first Windows release of Max 4.3 in August, 2003. We had a small office in downtown Santa Cruz in those early days. Living in proximity to David at that time afforded ample opportunity for him to guide me in the ways of our software. In the latter part of 2004 I moved back east to New Jersey. Cycling has always been a distributed company, though - so I continued working remotely. Over the years, it has been really amazing seeing the ways in which both Max and Cycling as a company have developed. I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to be part of this amazing team and am excited for the next chapter in our history!

Gregory Taylor:

Max and Me: Four photographs

1985: Doug - this guy who comes to my live gigs at the Cabbagetown Cafe in Ithaca, NY (tape loops around juice glasses, an Electro-Harmonix 16 second delay line, and MS-20 and a Casio, thanks for asking) - tells me he's moving to California to program music software, and that "the next version of the DX7" is going to be retunable instead of my having to burn new PROMs for it - he's going to write an editor/librarian for it, in fact. Young Doug turns out to be Douglas Wyatt of Apple fame, and the company he goes to work with is Opcode Systems. He winds up not writing the tuning editor stuff, and passes me along to a guy named David Zicarelli - the same guy who – as it turns out - does that amazing M and the Jam Factory stuff for Intelligent Music!

1989: My wife's on a Fulbright in Utrecht, and I'm doing the Sonology course in Den Haag (along with Gerhard Behles, who's the first person I ever met who took to granulation like other people take to bacon). One of my classmates tells me that there's something cool going down one afternoon back home in Utrecht at the Academy for the Arts (HKU) that I really ought to check it out. I jump a train home, walk to the big blue building, ring the bell, and join a whole bunch of other people (I am still stunned to discover who among my current circle of acquaintances who was in that room with me that day) listening to a couple of guys from IRCAM demonstrate something called Patcher (Max, to you), running on a Macintosh. It was love at first sight - it was intuitive, it ran while you patched, it didn't rely on parentheses or semicolons at all, and it had cool jumpy little slider things!!!! So long, Jam Factory - I'll roll my own.

1998: I run into David at the ICMC in Ann Arbor, who smiles and says he's got something to show me. It's called MSP - one of those Whisky Tango Foxtrot moments before we even knew to call it that. This thing runs on my Macintosh, looks really similar to the Max I already have, and will do bleedin' audio in real time without my having to drop several thousand bucks for an Ariel systems board for my Houston fire sale NeXT cube? Yes, please! My memory is that I wrote him a check, but that might be wrong - he might have offered to swap me a copy for doing some work for him. At any rate. I am absolutely not the first person to buy MSP (I recall being told it was jhno) for sure, but I was early in line.

1999: Over the years, my phone calls with David (who I spoke with and emailed for years before we ever met face-to-face) weren't limited to what we were reading and listening to and generally enthusiastic about - there was the occasional invitation to "do some work" for Cycling '74. I can't really tell you why I didn't say "Yes" earlier, but in the final year of the last millenium/century, I arrived home one evening from a very bad day doing marketing communications in the teledatacom hive to find an answering machine message from David Z. that - once again - asked me if I'd like to consider doing some work for Cycling '74. This time, I called him back, gave my notice the first thing next morning, and one of the best things that's ever happened to me began. The rest is, as they say, history - documentation, playing trade show booth monster, content creation, conferencing and workshopping, writing, Vizzie, and all that leads up to this moment, right now: back in Utrecht again with my morning coffee on Another Perfect Dutch Day (i.e. bucketing down the rain), working on patches to show as part of a talk I'm going to give at the HKU - the place where I first saw Max all those years ago.