Andrew Benson

Sometimes the possibilities of using Max are so broad that we love a creative constraint as a way to get us focussed and thinking of new patching ideas. What if your patch only had one button in it to interact with? We invited three artists from the Max community to take the challenge and show us what they came up with. Here are the results of that challenge, with downloadable Max patches included…

oneBang is an interactive audiovisual patch. I wanted to create something that looks and sounds organic. It takes on a life of its own: engagement is encouraged but not essential. The movement (sonic and visual) is driven by a jit.bfg and gets transformed by a push of the button.
Find more of Michael's work on Instagram 

“One_Button_Ocean” generates three audio layers, with accompanying video streams. It contains white noise lowpass filter swells, impulse clicks and background noises. It randomly selects the speed between the clicks, the frequency of the background noise and the frequency/volume of the white noise low pass filter. The simple low-fi visuals of cyan “spurts” are generated by the clicks, light blue “triangle waveforms” are created by the background grumbles and dark blue “sine style waveforms” are made from the white noise swells. The results are a digital ocean.
Find more of Matthew's work on Instagram


This patch is based on the idea that an mc.comb~ object can be repurposed to create polyphonic Karplus-Strong synth chords. The ‘one button’ creates a stream of midi notes (taken from a chord stored in a table object) which are then converted to delay times for the mc.comb~ Karplus-Strong synth. To add some tonality, the resulting stereo signal then is fed through some buffir~ objects with continually updating source buffers – this sometimes gives the synth a piano-like timbre. A simple reverb, made from another mc.comb~ object with a ‘harmonic’ mc wrapper message, gives some dimensionality to the sound. Many of the patch’s parameters are randomised with each press of the ‘one button’, creating a different vibe each time.
Find more of Ben's work on Instagram


Screen Shot 2022-12-07 at 1.05.30 PM.png

We invited 3 artists from the Max community to make a patch with only one button for interaction.

one-button-patching-challenge

One Button Patching Challenge

Christopher Jakobi

As a fairly high amount of people wanted to have a look at my patch "Drone Creator", I decided to post it here as a tool for download. If you haven’t seen my project "Aurora Drone" yet, you should visit the site to listen to a piece created with the patch. (https://cycling74.com/project/aurora-drone-drone-creator)

The basic idea is to load two sound files into the patch and play them at very low varying speeds. The default setting is a speed between 10 and 20 percent, a new value is chosen by a chance operator every 10 seconds, and slowly accelerating or slowing from one value to the other. Both channels work independently. Additionally L-R-panning supports the sound-colour shifts.

The frequency for the chance operator as well as a minimum value and a range can be adjusted.

From my experience especially disharmonic, bell-like sounds, pads, or rhythmic musical materials fit very well, while vocals or stressed drum sounds might lead to unsatisfying results. But as this is only what I witnessed from my limited experiments, I am glad for other opinions. Don’t forget to switch to presentation mode after opening the patch.

I would really appreciate any feedback or audio files of your own results with the patch for further improvement, just write a comment.

Two examples realized with the "Drone Creator"

Aurora Drone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05xodlkD4s4

Grains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qMeI6PJrYY

                          -----The following is the original description from my project "Aurora Drone"-----
“Aurora Drone” is the attempt to completely alter the character of a piece of music by playing it back at very low speeds. It is thus possible to change a very vivid Drum and Bass track into a minimalistic soundscape. With a Max/MSP patch that I programmed and called “Drone Creator” you can play up to two sound files at a time and the implemented chance operators immediately start to slowly modulate the play back speed (and therefore pitch) for both tracks independently, creating continuously changing layers of sound and rhythm. In this case I chose a Drum and Bass song called “Aurora” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqm1g8AFc8U) that I produced previously and which is played twice simultaneously at speeds between a factor of 0.1 and 0.3 of the original speed. Additionally both tracks are moving between the left and right channel contributing the shifting sounds in this piece.  With the Drone Creator it is possible to produce an immeasurable amount of sounds not limited to drones by the choice of the musical material fed into it as well as the variation of the parameters.

drone-creator

Drone Creator

Tobias Reber

Tobias Reber used a combination of algorithmic structure generators/step sequencers, samplers and a granular sampler that are programmed in Max/MSP.

Search Results