Newbie beginner here! Need general advice for creating an evolving soundscape in Max for a university assignment.
Hello people!
I’ll try be as concise as possible, thanks for reading!
I’m a student who is currently studying music production and I have been given a brief to create a live soundscape for a museum that evolves with audience interaction. Since we wouldn’t have the resources to create hardware to interact with I figured the best thing to do would be to have several mics setup (in this theoretical museum), and it picks up the ambient sounds of the audience and the exhibit, and plays them back through speakers set up around the museum, but with various audio design effects to create a swirling, luscious soundscape.
I’m inexperienced with Ableton and Max though! I have had a few lessons on creating some effects and instruments in Max some I’m comfortable with the sound design aspect, however I really need advice on how to get a mic input going into max, and then the output playing live.
My guess is that it‘d just be a case of creating a patch for an audio track with all the effects in the Max for Live plugin, and then turning on monitoring. I feel like I might’ve answered my own question, but I’d love some experienced people to maybe guide me into some good directions for what may help me create a live soundscape.
Thanks everyone!
Sidenote: we have been instructed to do this kind of research and learn ourselves, I’m not trying to get anyone to code my uni project for me haha
Sidenote: we have been instructed to do this kind of research and learn ourselves, I’m not trying to get anyone to code my uni project for me haha
ha, good note :)
go into the 'Help' menu for Max, and look under the 'Examples' folder, there you can get some quick ideas for advanced effects to plug and play with(for example, as a beginner, you might not have time to come up with your own reverb, but there's plenty of reverbs there to copy and paste into the signal-chain of your patch).
but i don't understand why you need to use Ableton at all in this case? i guess if you want rhythmic playback according to some other events on the Ableton-timeline, this makes sense, but there's nothing about anything-like-that in your description... so maybe you can just use Max alone? (setup 'record~' to record into the same buffer~ as a 'groove~' object is looping through, then a 'matrix~' at the output of that 'groove~' can randomly reroute through different effects within Max)... just some ideas... best of luck!
Ahhh yes! Thank you for the tip! I’ll have to give that a try, I’m very open to hearing about advanced stuff as I’ve had some experience coding so I feel as though I’m pretty okay with the intuitive nature of Max, I’ll check out that help section, as well as giving that matrix rerouting a try!
Thanks so much Raja! First time making contact with an alien, pleasant so far :)