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Andrew Pask

Recently I bumped into composer and performer Pauline Oliveros (PO) in San Diego. We got to talking about one of her current projects, the Adaptive Use Musical Instruments for the Physically Challenged. This project introduces software designed to be used in therapy sessions to give children with limited motor skills the opportunity to participate in music, and offer them an outlet for musical expression. I arranged for a follow-up interview by email so that we could learn more about what this project involves. Joining us is Zevin Polzin (ZP), the technical lead in the project.

How did the Adaptive Use project get off the ground?

 - I have a long time friend, Leaf Miller, who is a drummer and certified occupational therapist. We talked for years about how to use technology to help children with severely limited volitional movement to play in her drum class at REHAB Programs North Road School. I finally secured a small grant from the Malcolm S. Morse Foundation to begin.

In January 2007, I assembled a team together with Don Millard, director of the Academy of Electronic Media at 

 where I teach along with RPI student researchers and the staff of 

 (a non profit arts organization that I founded in 1985).

I asked Leaf for three students with the least volitional movement to begin the project. These students are confined to wheel chairs, cannot speak and have some controllable head movement. Our team did a site visit to assess the situation and the technology in use at the school. It was clear that we could do something not only to help the students but to also help the therapists.

How did you go about creating the software interfaces for the kids in the first place?

 - Zane Van Duzen, an undergraduate at the time, came to the next session with a camera tracker programmed in Max/MSP/Jitter on his MacBook Pro. Most of this patch is based on the cv.jit library developed by 

International Academy of Media Arts & Sciences and Jean-Marc Pelletier

Van Duzen's prototype showed the student's image on the computer screen with a marker placed on their virtual nose to move within the object zone. With very little lateral head movement crossing a line the student could trigger a digital switch programmed arbitrarily with a snare drum sound. The object zone is of course adjustable.

Additionally, the patch had a virtual keyboard programmed with a blues scale. The keyboard could also be played with lateral head movement. The Max patch was an immediate success and allowed the three children to improvise melodies. They made music for the very first time in their lives. Needless to say, to experience that moment with each child was very moving. Everyone present was changed by those moments.

Questions and comments from the therapists helped us to advance our work together. What colors to use for the interface, positioning of the camera, attack time of samples in relationship to movement, resolution, length of sessions, these are all important details. There is new information in every session.

 - We've really been focused on motion tracking for the time being, because it means that there are no moving parts or things to attach to the kids. Their movement ranges can vary day-to-day depending on a number of factors, so the software can be programmed to accommodate that.

Most existing tools presuppose a full range of movement, or more complicated gestures than these children are capable of. The real meat of this project is amplifying very small, limited movements into real musical expression. The only gestures these kids have made previously to communicate are all binary -- yes/no answers, or using physical switches to turn music on or off. Opening up a whole gradient of movement is new to them and is something we're in the middle of exploring.

Tell us about the kinds of things which have happened in sessions.

 - Early on, we upgraded the patch so that 4 different drum sounds could be triggered with slight side to side up and down head movements. With this increase in possibilities we had a breakthrough. Leaf played a drum pattern for A, a 16-year-old and then pointed to her to play. A answered with a pattern of her own using the 4 sounds. She improvised! Everyone in the room cheered. Without any prompting at all A understood on her own that she could move quickly to any of the 4 sounds by staying in the center of the quadrant pictured on the computer screen.

In the next session Leaf brought in some students from the drum class. They would play and listen for A. She played! We really felt like we were getting somewhere.

In the most recent session with A, we hooked up larger speakers so that her sounds had as much power and volume as the live drums. In this session A initiated patterns for the others to answer. This improvisation generated a great deal of excitement among all the students and therapists.

G, an 11-year-old played the virtual keyboard for the first time for an hour and did not want to leave the session. In a later session his mother came in the door and was stunned to hear her son playing music. G's mother was overcome and could not speak. When she came back another time she was able to participate. She told me that they are a musical family. G's sisters play flute and clarinet. She was excited and remarked that G was not in his high tone (stiffness) during instruction. We noticed that the students were more and more relaxed for subsequent sessions. G's mother was very helpful during the rest of the session.

B, a 9-year-old was often distracted by seeing himself on the computer screen. We learned to remove the picture and leave just the marker as a bright orange spot. Though B's response time was slower than the other two B could also trigger drum sounds and play the virtual keyboard.

How are these musical activities contributing to the kids' overall therapy?

 - As I suspected -- opening a creative, empowering portal for these children has initiated the beginning of potential for others with more mobility at the school to improvise and create their own music as well.

We are still in formative stages of the work. It is definitely improvisational and very creative for all concerned. The important thing is that the three students that we selected to work with have all been successful in making music of their own. It is quite easy to see how affected they are with their musical results. There are holistic and therapeutic side effects as well. We want to increase their possibilities for choice with improvisation as an empowerment for them.

Honing their physical movements with musical feedback gives the students greater ability to learn and interact in their environments and more precise control. My RPI colleague Curtis Bahn is very adept at translating physical motions into musical phrases using sensors and Max programming. Curtis is one of our technical advisors and is joining the Adaptive Use project. His interest in computer interfaces for the physically challenged is a great asset to this project and its future evolution.

How is the project developing and how do you see its future? Do you have any plans to open source it or make it available for others to use?

 - We're interested in moving away from grids and using relative movement. This will enable us to track more subtle movements and create more sophisticated sounds.

We're working to make the patch more modular and "open source" so other people can participate in the development. However, the underlying patch will never be entirely "open source" -- not for commercial reasons but because a large part of the project is developing a methodology with the therapists which greatly influences the design.

The sound-making algorithms themselves are modular and open source, and we hope to provide guidelines on how to program "modules" for this project in the future.

 - Nan Jia, an engineering student from RPI has created a robot drummer that plays a miniature drum set. We connected it to the camera tracker so the children could play it. The robot drummer is an important direction for this project as my ideal plan is to make it possible for these students to play real instruments with robotic interfaces.

For the future we want to have an Adaptive Use wiki and invite the participation of others to develop the high potential of this project and to meet the needs of millions of people who would benefit greatly emotionally and spiritually from making music.

If you want to know more about the Adaptive Use Instrument or Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening Institute, please visit 

Cycling '74 would like to thank Pauline and Zevin and all the staff on the Adaptive Use project for making this interview possible.

PO - I have a long time friend, Leaf Miller, who is a drummer and certified occupational therapist. We talked for years about how to use technology to help children with severely limited volitional movement to play in her drum class at REHAB Programs North Road School. I finally secured a small grant from the Malcolm S. Morse Foundation to begin.

In January 2007, I assembled a team together with Don Millard, director of the Academy of Electronic Media at RPI where I teach along with RPI student researchers and the staff of Deep Listening Institute, Ltd. (a non profit arts organization that I founded in 1985).

PO - Zane Van Duzen, an undergraduate at the time, came to the next session with a camera tracker programmed in Max/MSP/Jitter on his MacBook Pro. Most of this patch is based on the cv.jit library developed by International Academy of Media Arts & Sciences and Jean-Marc Pelletier.

ZP - We've really been focused on motion tracking for the time being, because it means that there are no moving parts or things to attach to the kids. Their movement ranges can vary day-to-day depending on a number of factors, so the software can be programmed to accommodate that.

PO - Early on, we upgraded the patch so that 4 different drum sounds could be triggered with slight side to side up and down head movements. With this increase in possibilities we had a breakthrough. Leaf played a drum pattern for A, a 16-year-old and then pointed to her to play. A answered with a pattern of her own using the 4 sounds. She improvised! Everyone in the room cheered. Without any prompting at all A understood on her own that she could move quickly to any of the 4 sounds by staying in the center of the quadrant pictured on the computer screen.

PO - As I suspected -- opening a creative, empowering portal for these children has initiated the beginning of potential for others with more mobility at the school to improvise and create their own music as well.

ZP - We're interested in moving away from grids and using relative movement. This will enable us to track more subtle movements and create more sophisticated sounds.

PO - Nan Jia, an engineering student from RPI has created a robot drummer that plays a miniature drum set. We connected it to the camera tracker so the children could play it. The robot drummer is an important direction for this project as my ideal plan is to make it possible for these students to play real instruments with robotic interfaces.

If you want to know more about the Adaptive Use Instrument or Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening Institute, please visit http://www.deeplistening.org/adaptiveuse

Cycling '74 would like to thank Pauline and Zevin and all the staff on the Adaptive Use project for making this interview possible.


the-adaptive-use-instruments-project

The Adaptive Use Instruments Project

David Zicarelli

Sometimes when you are programming, you need to be able to configure some information about how your computer will do its job. Over the years, programmers have come up with a number of different terms for these little pieces of information -- parameters, properties, fields, etc. In Max, we call them attributes. Attributes were first introduced in Jitter, where they make it convenient to manage the state of complex objects such as jit.qt.movie. In Max 4.5, a few Max objects such as pattr (which is short for "patcher attributes" by the way) and js began to make use of attributes.

Jitter users will be familiar with the fact that the initial value of an attribute can be set when typing arguments into an object box. Here's an example:

This sets the initial value of the loop attribute to the number 2 (for palindrome looping) and the initial value of the highquality attribute to 1. Subsequent messages to the object can just say loop 2 or highquality 1. The @ serves to delineate the arguments setting the initial value of each attribute. Setting multiple arguments for an object that uses attributes is typically easier to read due to the @ syntax. (For example, would you know what 2 and 1 meant if you saw an object that had jit.qt.movie 2 1 as arguments? You'd probably have to look it up in the manual.)

In Max 5, we're beginning the process of converting the basic Max and MSP objects to use attributes. At the same time, we're adding user interface features to make your interaction with attributes more fun and useful. However, there are hundreds of Max objects and we probably won't complete the task of "attributizing" all of them with the first Max 5 release. For the most part, we've concentrated on user interface objects, because we've used attributes as the basis of our new UI object design, including the way you edit the settings of UI objects with inspectors. Unlike the inspectors in Max 4, which were patches created laboriously by hand, these new inspectors are automatically generated based on an object's attributes. We moved to this system because we wanted to offer a rich set of attribute-based editing features that would be consistent across all objects including:

Let's take a closer look at a simple UI object, the toggle, to see how some of these new attribute features work. We're going to use color attributes to demonstrate some of the features mentioned above, because they're, well, colorful and obvious. But the same principles apply to any attribute.

The Max 5 toggle object offers the customization of the color used for the X, the background, and the frame. All of these colors are now defined as attributes, so you can edit them in the toggle inspector window. The programmer of the toggle object has identified these attributes as colors, so the inspector displays a color editor, which features a set of presets you can modify and store in collections right from within the editor. In addition, due to the new compositing graphics engine we're using, you can set alpha -- or transparency -- values for any color. Colors with an alpha value less than 1 are transparent to some extent; the closer the alpha value is to 0, the more transparent they are. The movie below shows the inspector for toggle and the color editor in action.

Now let's look at some other tricks we can do with attributes. As in Jitter, Max UI object attributes can be modified programmatically by sending messages to the object. So let's write a patch to do this. The first thing to notice is that while we see polite descriptions of our toggle colors such as "Frame Color", these are not the real attribute names. To work with the real names, we have a number of options. First, the real attribute name shows up in the new Clue Window when we move the mouse over an attribute in the inspector, along with a description of what the attribute does.

Alternatively, if you want to control the attribute via a message to the object you're inspecting, you can just drag the attribute out of the inspector into your patch. If you drag it near the object it will make a message box where you release the mouse with attributename $1. If you drag it onto the object, a message box will be created that is automatically connected.

Finally, there is a column called Attribute in the inspector that is initially hidden. You can show it by clicking the Show Attribute Names button in the inspector toolbar. Now all the official attribute names are displayed.

Below is a patch that manipulates the color of the toggle border. It's not the most useful thing in the world, but it will allow us to demonstrate a new feature of Max 5 called attribute freezing. First, let me give you a little background on the problem we are trying to address with this feature. When you type counter 128 into an object box, you are setting the maximum value of the counter, and every time the patcher file is loaded, the counter has the same maximum value of 128, regardless of what its maximum value was when you saved the patch. However, there are many settings of an object you can't set by typing in arguments, so Max programmers are often forced to set them manually using a loadbang object connected to a message box. And even when you can set initial values for object settings, such as by using attributes in Jitter, the number of arguments you have to type into an object box can quickly get out of hand.

But here's the real issue: when we animate the border color of our toggle, the value of this color attribute is left at its last animated value when we save the patch, because UI objects don't have any concept of "typed-in arguments." However, we'd like it to be set to a specific fixed value when the patch is opened to provide a good impression. Before Max 5, the only way to do this would be to add a message box connected to a loadbang to set the color of the toggle's border attribute when the patch is opened. But now, we can use the inspector window to set the border color and then freeze the attribute so that the value saved in the patcher will not be affected by our color animation.

This movie shows the process of freezing the attribute. First, you'll see that the color value shown in the inspector actually animates as the patch manipulates the background color value. Next, we'll stop the animation and set a value that we really like as a starting point, then freeze the background color. Note how the attribute name turns (ice) blue when the attribute is in a frozen state. Finally, you'll see the toggle object duplicated, which is the same as saving the object and reloading it. Even though the original toggle has a gray background color from our animation patch, the newly created toggle has a background color equivalent to the frozen value.

Any attribute can be frozen in this way, whether it's in a UI object such as a toggle or lives inside an object in an object box such as jit.qt.movie. Dynamic attribute manipulation is used by a lot of Jitter patches, and the ability to freeze attribute values will make it easier to work from a known starting point.

Now that we've taken a look at editing and freezing attributes in the inspector, let's look at one more thing -- a faster way to view the state of an object. I want to show you an enhanced version of the somewhat obscure quick reference menu that existed in previous versions of Max. In Max 4.x, you could shift-control-click (or was it option-command-click? I can never remember) on an object to see a list of messages the object responds to as well as a list of its attributes and their current values. In Max 5, this menu has a few new features. First of all, it is much easier to access. Just click on the left inlet of any object. Second, the quick reference menu is linked to the on-line documentation, so as you mouse over any message or attribute name, you'll get a description of what it does in the clue window. And finally, you can actually select any item from the menu, and Max will create a message box with the message or attribute name, connect it to the object, and even let you start typing any arguments immediately.

Finally, note also that when we show the quick reference menu on our toggle, you even see which attributes are frozen.

I hope you've enjoyed this brief look at some of the new attribute features of Max 5. In the next Max 5 article, I'll show you some of the new Max 5 debugging features, including wiretaps, the debug window, and the signal and matrix probes. You'll see that attributes are as useful to have around when you are debugging your patches as when you are decorating them.

setting an attribute to its default value

dragging any attribute out of an inspector to create a message box

freezing attributes (I'll explain this in a minute)

consistent editing for attributes based on their type

attribute documentation available when you need it

max-5-and-attributes

Max 5 and Attributes

Episode 1: The redecorated interface and the defaults system

The first thing you might notice about Max 5 is the new look of the objects. We've redecorated with a new appearance to ensure you can immediately identify the basic elements of a patch. It doesn't try to be photorealistic, primarily because the interface scales so you can look at a patch at any resolution. That includes zooming out as well as zooming in.

Get the Latest on Max and our Community

The Adaptive Use Instruments Project

Max 5 and Attributes

A First Look at Max 5

Max 5: What It Is (and Isn't)

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Q & A with Amoebazoid

Cycling '74's Office Relocation, Part 2

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