OpenMusic + MaxMSP

>Does anyone here have any experience with OpenMusic? I'm just
>curious to hear anyone's thoughts about MaxMSP vs. OpenMusic for
>generative/interactive composition stuff. Also, I'm curious about
>integration with MaxMSP.
>
>Any OpenMusic stories anybody can share?
>

i still use Patchwork much more than open music, but for your
question that's about the same...

for composition, PW/OM is much better than max - i was meant for
this. Now, what is called composition here is assembling material
which will end up as a score, or in some cases a midi file.

now if it is a generative stuff, or interactive...
well OM does not work in real time (even if I know some crazy guys
who used LISP in real time....)

as of OM & max, when the obvious would be a midi-file, what i did a
lot more was to use OM (or PW) to generate files which i then could
use in colls - could be frequencies for microtonal stuff, precise
time, pan or spatialisation data.....

also great for generating scores for CSound - which you could use in
max with csound~

hope it helps

best

kasper
--
Kasper T. Toeplitz
noise, composition, bass, computer
http://www.sleazeArt.com

hmm... Intersting, thanks.

I guess, more specifically, what I'm interested in is developing a system which analyzes existing music (midi files), then builds a sort of style template from the analysis. This part would be non-realtime, but the analysis data would then be used to improvise in realtime. I'm imagining this as a modular, agent-based environment, where the little "improvisors" partly respond to user input and partly to one another.

I was looking at OpenMusic because it seems to have some ready-made tools for analysis. I guess markov and histo are sort of like this as well... so I suppose I may just be getting lazy! I also like the fact that OM seems to have some nice notation-based objects, and a more useful timeline-ish implementation. But perhaps this is all just a grass-is-greener thing(?)

Mind you, I do like the "scoob" music representation in ftm; it's pretty intuitive and musically clear. Though I wish you could drag note duration (maybe soon).

Anyway, thanks again. If you have any more thoughts about any of the above please let me know.

cheers,

J.

oops! Almost forgot. Is there any point trying to build OM 4.7.1 with OpenMCL, or do I really need the digitool MCL (or to just buy the distro from Ircam)? I'm on Mac OS X.4.7 (Intel or PPC).

thanks,

J.

>
>Anyway, thanks again. If you have any more thoughts about any of the
>above please let me know.

if you start from scratch in PW/ OM i would sugest to have a look at
Mikael laurson's PWGL (http://www2.siba.fi/PWGL/ )

it's still beta etc, but for some reason i belive it has a great
potential (Laurson , as far as i know, is the person behin patchwork
which then became openMusic)

pwgl is freeware, by the way - and from what i understood (never
really tried it yet) it does real time synthesis...

best

kasper
--
Kasper T. Toeplitz
noise, composition, bass, computer
http://www.sleazeArt.com

Hey! That looks nice!!! Real music notation, old-school. Yum!

thanks for posting that link!

J.

Wow--PWGL looks really nice! I'll have to try it out soon. Along the lines of open score file analysis and manipulation, I'm thinking that the future may very well be in MusicXML. Is anyone working on this, besides just using it as a storage and transfer format?

Tim

On Sat, 26 Aug 2006, Kasper T Toeplitz wrote:

> now if it is a generative stuff, or interactive...
> well OM does not work in real time (even if I know some crazy guys who used
> LISP in real time....)

[maxlisp] -- http://music.columbia.edu/~brad/maxlisp/

.. definitely *not* for those afraid of crashing max/msp. :-)

brad
http://music.columbia.edu/~brad

I wonder if now 12 years after the original post the situation is different. I wonder if somebody has done an equivalence and introduced improvements in max to take it at the same level as OM. I am using MAXSCORE but I still think there are more tools needed or I still dont know them.. Can everything in OM be duplicated in MAX?

best

As composer's tool, with Bach and Cage packages available (via the package manager) Max can do more or less the same, what OpenMusic or PWGL (in terms of features and style). Of course OM and PWGL are great environments and you can use them together with Max (and connect them via OSC, MIDI, etc.) or separately. For sound synthesis and visual media Max is still much better (actually OM and PWGL have no Jitter equivalents - so it has no sense to adopt them to visuals). There are of course more visual environments available now, however - in my opinion - Max is really strong on this field. I think, to supplement Max with something really different, you would need to put it together with one of text-based languages or frameworks (SuperCollider and CSound are good examples).

That's what seems to me fairly new are the growing capabilities of web browsers - some audio synthesis/analysis and code-driven composition is now possible thru simple JavaScript code running inside the browser.