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Lilli Wessling Hart

For the first time, we are offering a three-day Max workshop only for high school students ages 15-18. It will take place at the Cycling '74 office in San Francisco, July 27-29 (10:30am-3:30pm).

The application period has ended. No more applications will be accepted at this time.

Max is a visual programming language for interactive audio and video applications used by innovative musicians, artists, and developers. It is a major component of media arts programs at leading universities worldwide. With Max, you can explore basic concepts in digital audio, video, physical computing, and create your own interactive media software, bringing art and technology together. 

Get more detailed information about Max here

Max (MIDI), MSP (digital audio), and Jitter (video processing) are all part of "Max". The students will learn the basics of each, see how Max is used in many different settings, and get hands-on experience with hardware often used in conjunction with Max. Here is an outline of what to expect:

 should be submitted by June 5th for consideration. If you or your parent/guardian has any questions, 

Click on the images below to learn more. (All image and video copyrights belong to the artists and organizations noted below.)

We will offer two 30-minute orientations for students and his or her parent/guardian. 

 At the orientation, the Cycling '74 representatives and teachers will meet and discuss the workshop at the Cycling '74 office.

Max is a visual programming language for interactive audio and video applications used by innovative musicians, artists, and developers. It is a major component of media arts programs at leading universities worldwide. With Max, you can explore basic concepts in digital audio, video, physical computing, and create your own interactive media software, bringing art and technology together. Get more detailed information about Max here.

 Max (MIDI), MSP (digital audio), and Jitter (video processing) are all part of "Max". The students will learn the basics of each, see how Max is used in many different settings, and get hands-on experience with hardware often used in conjunction with Max. Here is an outline of what to expect:

Verbal Group Review (Why doesn't this work? What is this patch for?)

Watch short videos of C74 artists and discuss their systems.

The application should be submitted by June 5th for consideration. If you or your parent/guardian has any questions, please email us or call Erin (415-974-1818 ext. 2#) before submitting the application.

This is a free program. Up to 8 students are selected based on the application process.

Each student is responsible for his/her transportation to the Cycling '74 office, located 3 blocks south of the Civic Center BART station. Parking is not available.

After completion of the workshop, each student will receive a free copy of Max/MSP/Jitter. The software will be registered in the student's name and cannot be resold.

We will offer two 30-minute orientations for students and his or her parent/guardian. Dates to be announced. At the orientation, the Cycling '74 representatives and teachers will meet and discuss the workshop at the Cycling '74 office.


summer-max-workshop-for-high-school-students

Summer Max Workshop for High-School Students

Our next Max workshop will be held in Los Angeles, CA, and is strictly for beginners. This workshop is specifically for new users of Max or Max for Live, and is intended to provide an introduction to Max, MSP, and Jitter together as a unit in the context of Max and Max for Live.

The workshop concentrates on the basics of working with Max users in a variety of situations including audio and image processing. The topics to be covered in the workshop include an overview of Max, MSP, and Jitter objects in their Max and Max for Live environments, basic audio and video processing techniques, strategies for patch design, user interface design, techniques for better patching, and learning & problem solving.

There is an emphasis on strategies for learning that can be applied after the workshop ends.

Participants are required to bring their own Windows or Mac laptops with the current version of Max installed, a three-month Max/MSP/Jitter software authorization will be provided with the $150 class fee. Max for Live is optional and can be purchased from Ableton.

Click here to purchase a space. Space is limited to 20 students.

date: Tuesday 22 June - Friday 25 June, 9:30 a.m to 5:30 p.m..

location: Machine Project, 1200 D North Alvarado, Los Angeles, CA 90026

location website: http://machineproject.com/

maxmspjitter-beginner-workshop-in-los-angeles

Max Workshop in Los Angeles

Marsha Vdovin

Elise Baldwin is an intermedia artist that works with music and projections. I find her work to be both fragile and dense, inspiring me creatively on several levels. She creates music that interacts with both live and recorded video.

The work is delicate and organic and hides the complicated technology underneath. Elise has a Masters Degree in Electronic Music from 

 and a demanding day job is as Audio Director on the Sims games at 

Let's start with a little of your background.

I grew up in a rural part of Idaho, on a farm. My parents moved to the Bay Area when I was like 11 or 12. And I've been here, in Northern California, more or less since.

Did you play music when you were younger?

Yeah. I played the piano from a pretty early age. I was always very attracted to recording technologies, which I'm sure a lot of sound people will tell you. I remember doing a lot of radio plays with my brother in our rooms, when we were kids.

My mom had one of those old-school cassette recorders that was bigger than my computer is. [Laughs]. We would make these really elaborate radio plays. I was always very interested in theater, in sound and music. I'm very into literature as well.

I feel like a lot of my artistic and professional life has been about trying to synergize and combine mediums in different ways. When I was younger, I did a lot of theater, because I was attracted to both the liveness and the technical part of it.

Then I moved into filmmaking, and was really into that, because there was sound and acting and script, and light and cinematography. All these different art forms that I loved.

In the early '90s I started working in the multimedia CD-ROM industry and was really interested in how stories came together in this electronic medium. I think my professional work in video games is just another example of me trying to intuitively put together different mediums and see what happens.

I also think there's been an increasing move towards live performance, and improvisation in my artwork.

I went to UC Santa Cruz for my undergraduate film/video degree. It was part of the theater major at that time, so you had to do all the theater stuff, too.

That was the place where I realized that I really enjoyed working with technology. The film department there had one of the first computerized online video editing systems, a Grass Valley system. [Laughs.] That huge tape-based editing system was so clunky when I think about it now, but at the time it was the height of—I mean, I couldn't believe we had one. It was 1989, probably. I was so excited to work on it. And I loved sitting in a dark room, by myself, with a wall of gear, and just working. Editing just really clicked for me.

Were you doing music on the side? Were you in bands?

No, I never did that much performing with other people until later, when I went to Mills. That was enforced by the curriculum, as was improvisation, which I had not done a lot of and was pretty freaked out about. But Max helped with that.

I went to Mills fairly recently, actually. At that point I had worked as a professional sound designer mostly, but also doing some After Effects work, and a lot of video editing. But from 1991 to 2002, I was specializing more and more in audio production.

In 2002 I was working for MTV Networks as an audio director in their online division and running their recording studio. I had this moment where I said to myself, "I love my job, but maybe I want to go back to school." I had stopped making much art, and felt a little burnt out from doing creative services work professionally. I was basically making these fixed sound art pieces, which were all postproduction technology. There was nothing live about it. I was doing some electronic music, but again, it was very pre-programmed, and everything was fixed.

This sound art was completely separate from my piano playing, and my visual-arts interests as well. They were all very disparate practices. The only place in my sound life where I really felt like there was a live thing happening was when I would do sound design for theater, which I used to do a lot of. That kept me attached to the excitement of live performance, but I wasn't an improviser. I didn't feel comfortable improvising.

Mills turned out to be the perfect place for me. It was really cool, because I, on a lark, not even really sure that I would go if I got in, made this application, and then I got laid off from my job about a month later, and I said to myself, "Perfect. Time to make art." [Laughs.]

It was really fortuitous, because I got to go back to graduate school with a lot of work experience, and a strong sense of putting my work life, my career aside to make art right now. So it felt very focused to me.

What professors did you work closely with?

I worked closely with Maggie Payne, who I adore, and I worked very closely with Les Stuck. He's primarily responsible for any facility that I have in Max. He really got me on the road.

I had been studying Supercollider. It was the first time I'd ever used a text-line programming environment for music creation, and I was really frustrated by the lack of visual data. Coming from a postproduction and recording engineer background, I wanted to be able to see what was plugging into what and what effect that was having on the audio signal. I'm very visually spatial and I couldn't do that, so it was quite challenging.

I thought, ‘I'm not stupid, but this is really counterintuitive for me.' I was just plugging away at it, feeling a lack of agency in any aesthetic successes that occurred, although I did manage to make several pieces I loved—mostly through a series of happy accidents, I felt. Then I started looking at Imagine, and a couple of other programs that encouraged signal cross processing between audio and video, because I knew that I really wanted to combine those mediums for myself.

Then Jitter came out. I thought, "Hallelujah!" So I trucked off to Les Stuck's office, and told him, "Les, I need you to teach me Jitter." And he looked at me, and he says, "Well... you might want to know a little something about Max before you start on Jitter. And I said, "Oh, no, no. I'm fine. I just want to know Jitter."

Les is a great teacher, and he was very gracious, because I continued to put the Jitter cart in front of the Max horse—and he let me do it. I mean, with helpful suggestions, but he didn't get frustrated with me. I had very elaborate ideas for things I wanted to build, and I would go prattle at him all about them and then he would help me build a tiny part of the thing I had described. And of course six months later I said, "Oh, I see what you meant. You were right." [Laughs.]

But it was great. I learned a lot from him. And it was really wonderful, because not only could I combine these two mediums that I loved and had been semi-consciously trying to interconnect for 20 years, but also Max came to me at a time when I was actually ready to start improvising. That was a difficult juncture for me, and frightening. As a musician, I had played the piano classically for years, and just didn't really think about music that way. Then I got to Mills, and it was like, "Play" and I thought ‘Play what? Where's the score?' [Laughs.]

So Max was great, because it was a real treat to be able to build my own setup for improvisation. I had tried to improvise with the piano and found that I didn't take to it at all. So now I had this other way to do that.

Yeah. I'd say so. It was difficult. That experience in itself was interesting for me, because I have always thought of myself as being extremely technically apt. So it was kind of crushing that it was hard. I was really used to just opening something up and making something with it. And it wasn't like that at all.

But once you got over the learning curve?

I had a lot of experience working with hardware, and hardware signal flows, so it helped me to have these mental models of things that I might build in Max. Having the knowledge of the hardware made the translation to the programming environment much easier for me because I had mental models to work off of. And once I grokked the freedom and power of the toolset and moved beyond those mental models, it became a whole other obsessive creative activity for me.

I would say Max is really the only program I use for live performance these days.

Do you use it in your work at all, at EA?

Actually, yeah, we do use it. It's been really gratifying to see it make a pipeline production incredibly efficient. I work with a tight-knit community of audio artists there, and there are several people who've contributed significantly to the development of our voice-editing tools, which are all done in Max/MSP.

Kent Jolly, who's an Audio Director for the Spore team, built the first iteration of the voice pipeline tools, and then Dave Swenson and Marielle Jakobsons who I work with, have further refined them. I had a little hand in it, but mostly I just was beta testing.

It's awesome, because a six to eight-hour voiceover recording day used to take us about forty hours to cut and edit and now it's down to three days, with our pipeline tools. So it's saved us a lot of time and money. It's all Javascript based. We have a recording tool as well as an editing tool. It's great to be able to create custom tools.

I also use Max a lot at work to prototype game-engine mechanics without actually having them made or integrated in game code. As an example, we do a lot of voice pitch shifting in our games, and I built a pitch shifter that I can use on voiceover auditions to see how somebody's voice is going to pitch shift before we cast them and put it in game.

We actually eliminate or choose people sometimes based on whether or not their voice will pitch shift well, without artifacting. Every voice is different in its ability. It has to do with the timbral and frequency characteristics of the voice—some pitch shift better than others. So it was a fun tool that only took me a couple days to build. It's been really useful.

When you finished grad school, did you have expectations of how that was going to affect your career, or what you were going to do next?

Get the Latest on Max and our Community

Summer Max Workshop for High-School Students

Max Workshop in Los Angeles

An Interview with Elise Baldwin

An Interview with Chris Coleman

Sound On Sound Reviews Max for Live

Software Release: Max 5.1.3

EM Reviews Max for Live

An Interview with Stretta

Cycling '74 at the 2010 NAMM Show

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