Cycling '74

In April 2009, Cycling '74 held its first user conference, Expo '74.
San Francisco-based performer Pamela Z describes how she uses Max in
her work and shows her performance controllers.

Expo '74 Conference: Presentation by Pamela Z

In her first years of using Max, Pamela Z was able shed the hardware weight by building her own instrument in Max. Take a look inside her Max instrument and her custom controllers during this presentation from Expo '74.

pamela-zs-presentation-from-expo-74

Pamela Z's Presentation from Expo '74

Lilli Wessling Hart

Dan Nigrin will be leading one of nine community-driven workshops at Expo '74 in Brooklyn this October. Read on for more information about his workshop and some history of his work.

Many people that create Max standalones like to present as professional a package as possible, mimicking other applications that users routinely encounter. This workshop will cover many aspects of this process, including: use of the standalone object, using a custom application icon, menubar customization, including documentation within your app, creating custom installers / uninstallers, removal of unnecessary Max files from within your application bundle, and application protection for commercial distribution. If you wish to practice during the workshop, you'll need to bring a laptop with Max 5 installed.

I wear several hats.  On the creative side, I started out as a college and club DJ in Baltimore, MD in the mid to late-80's, through the transition from industrial dance stuff all the way through to the beginnings of techno.  DJ'ing in turn led to the creation of original new music, together with a good friend who was also a DJ, as "Glitch" - we ended up releasing records on some of the seminal independent labels of the time (early to mid-90's), including R&S, Fax, Industrial Strength, Radikal, Antler-Subway, etc... We worked with people who are now legendary in the techno world, including Richie Hawtin, Lenny Dee, and others. Eventually, we decided to create our own label on which to release or music (and eventually many other people's music too), and so Defective Records  was born.  Although we don't put out too much music any more these days, Defective still serves as the home for my software creations (almost all of which are Max-based).  Most recently I recreated some unique hardware step-sequencers using Max (the M185 and the Klee); in the past I created a "glitch" type plugin (recurring theme!) called Major Malfunction using Max 4, and also an app called MC-202 Hack, which was a reverse-engineering of the Roland MC-202's tape save format, allowing MIDI files to be transferred to/from that old synth's sequencer.  I'm also very involved in Jack OS X, the Mac port of the Jack Audio Connection Kit.  Recently, I've been getting into synth DIY, building a variety of synthesizer kits (e.g. x0xb0x/x0xi0, Shruthi, and WTPA).

All of the stuff above is what I do with my spare time for fun - my day job is serving as Chief Information Officer at Children's Hospital Boston, where I'm also a pediatric endocrinologist.

I started out using Max in mid-2000, when I was bemoaning the fact that there was no lightweight VST instrument plugin host to use with all of the cool plugins coming out.  I wanted to be able to just fire up a simple app to host the plugin, and then play it remotely with an external keyboard.  So in researching ways to do this, I found Max/MSP.  I released version 1 of my VSTi Host  standalone app in late 2000, which was the result.  I briefly connected with Atsunori Namba from Japan soon after, who improved significantly on my original version, and from whom I learned a lot about Max just by looking at his patches!  I unfortunately lost touch with him since.  But by then, I had the Max bug, and I just started building more and more stuff with it over time, learning from others on mailing list and forums.

What technology or person's work intrigues you most right now?

I mentioned synth DIY above, and one company (Mutable Instruments) and man (Olivier Gillet) impress me to no end.  Starting with the Shruti-1 synth, and followed soon after by the Shruthi-1, these synths are hybrid digital/analog, and pack an incredible amount of functionality and *sound* in a small package, that you build completely on your own.  Olivier self-taught himself the hardware side of things, which is amazing in its own right, but the things he does in software too are really exceptional.  I predict big things for him and his company!

What is the most exciting part of attending Expo '74?

Max has always been an "alone" exercise for me, and it will be so cool to finally put some faces to names (especially some of the folks from C74 whom I have corresponded with over the years), and to meet and chat with others who have similar interests.  Not to mention learning new things and techniques about Max, and seeing the cool new Max 6 coming attractions, etc...

Dan Nigrin talks about his Expo '74 workshop.

making-a-slick-max-standalone

Making A Slick Max Standalone

Ben Houge will be leading one of nine community-driven workshops at Expo '74 in Brooklyn this October. Read on for more information about his workshop and some history of his work.

While attending Ben's workshop, you will build a simple music engine, similar to the one he used to prototype the music system of Tom Clancy's EndWar at Ubisoft. Focus will be on a cell-based system, flexible enough to turn on a dime in response to game events, with no loops and no fades. To participate, you'll need to bring a laptop with Max 5 (including MSP) installed.  Ben will provide some sample data, or you may bring/create your own.

Well, it sort of depends on when you catch me.  My career for the past 15 years has been audio design for video games, having spent 7 years at Sierra (working on Leisure Suit Larry 7, King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity, Half-Life: Opposing Force, Arcanum, and others) and 4 years at Ubisoft (most of which was spent as audio director of Tom Clancy’s EndWar).  But for most of the past 3 years I’ve been focusing on finding ways to apply organizational concepts from the inherently indeterminate medium of video games in a broader cultural arena, in particular exploring physical spaces through the medium of sound installation.  I’ve also been investigating applying the same non-linear principles to visual data.

I’ve recently been busy with projects at the Boston Cyberarts Festival, the Axiom Center for New and Experimental Media (Boston), e4c gallery (Seattle), and the San Diego Museum of Art.  I currently teach video game audio at Berklee College of Music and Boston University Center for Digital Imaging Arts.

I came very close to taking a Max class at IRCAM in 1995 while doing an exchange program in France, but fate intervened.  So I know I’ve been aware of and curious about Max at least since then.  I started using it around the time it was ported to Windows, 2002 or so, as I recall.  I did my master’s at the University of Washington from 2002-2004, after I’d already been making games for a while, taking advantage of Sierra’s continuing education program, which was great in that it helped me articulate more succinctly the questions I wanted to address with graduate study.  Max figured prominently into one class in particular, Sensing and Control Systems for Digital Art, taught by Bret Battey, and I also did my master’s thesis in Max/MSP, a sound installation project entitled Radiospace.

Max has been my main axe since then.  I moved from Seattle to Shanghai in 2004 to take the job with Ubisoft, and when I first landed and hadn’t yet met any collaborators, Max allowed me to continue to make music as a one man band.  Max also became increasingly prominent in my video game work, as I used it to prototype game audio deployment systems, notable the innovative music system we developed for EndWar, which will be the focus of my Expo 74 workshop.

I’m keeping a close eye on Björk’s new Biophilia project; to call it an “album” seems too reductive.  I’ve been convinced for a long time that the successor to the CD would be the app, and this seems like the first major project to pull a lot of these ideas together cohesively and on a grand scale.  I really believe that real-time, interactive, digitally mediated experiences are going to be the primary mode of experiencing music in the future, and the place to look for direct precedent is field of video game audio.

It’s definitely an exciting time for independent game projects and apps, especially as game audio middleware like Wwise and FMOD has become standard, game engines like Unity and UDK are available to indie devs for free, iPhone/iPad/Android are viable platforms for small scale games, and XBLA and PSN provide a distribution alternative to the big lumbering game publishers. I’m also very excited about the possibilities of HTML5.

Let’s see, who else…Messiaen is a constant inspiration for sonic forms that inhabit a kind of perpetual present, similar to what games must do.  I’m currently working my way through his complete organ works (the Latry boxed set).  My friend Wang Changcun, the most active Max user I met while living in China, just shared his new project with me (entitled “sorry, autocorrect”), with some really nice algorithmic grooves, although I’m not sure if I’m allowed to share the link yet.  Carl Stone is also never far down my listening list.  And lately I’ve been reading a lot of Jim Harrison poetry.

I’m just really excited to see what other people are working on.  The great thing about Max is that it’s so vast that I don’t think anyone really masters the whole enchilada; instead people dig down deep into whatever they’re into.  It was encouraging to read that most presenters don’t consider themselves Max whizzes; they’re whizzes in their particular thing, and Max is the tool.

I’m also very excited to find out more about Max 6, which is sounding amazing so far!

Self-Portrait, Dusk, at the Point of Departure

Ben Houge talks about his Expo '74 workshop.

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