Andrew Pask

Duane Pitre is a musician and programmer.

I began using Max in 2008, at the suggestion of a friend who was in the Columbia Electronic Music PhD program. He was working pretty heavily with Max at the time and we’d talked about how I was looking for ways to better facilitate the use of Just Intonation in my work (something I’d been studying for a couple of years at the time). Although I was working with acoustic and electro-acoustic instruments during that period, using electronics via Max seemed to be an easy way to navigate through the tuning systems I wanted to experiment with. We worked together on the concepting and he built me a patch (to be used in conjunction with a couple of controllers) that would enable me to build custom tunings and change them on the fly. It also allowed me to do other things such as custom build my own synth timbres. After quite a bit of work over a year’s time or so the patch was finished. This is the patch I use to perform Feel Free, both the solo and ensemble versions.

How do you know when something you are working on is finished?

I feel that the type of music I make is the kind that can be eternally adjusted and tweaked. But I guess it’s a sort of content feeling that I get, I just know that it’s “right” at some point, and I stop working on it. That’s not to say I get this feeling with all of the work I do. And when I don’t get this feeling when working on a piece/project, which is usually the case, I scrap it or put it aside to go back to it at a later date. But with the latter scenario, I almost always feel the same way about it when I revisit it…that it still isn’t “right.” I suppose this is my ‘weeding out’ process.

When do you like to use chance or random processes? 

Such processes are a big part of my work. I utilize highly controlled chance and randomness, somewhat reminiscent of the kind that can be found in our biological world. I use them to do such things as arrange material, usually in real-time, via probability-based systems that I create (for computers or ensembles). I also use them, in conjunction with these arrangement tasks, for choosing pitch information from fixed “pitch pools” that I construct. These groups of pitches are usually scales I’ve created in Just Intonation, which commonly vary from octave to octave regarding which intervals are allowed. For example, an interval allowed in say the 4th octave might not be allowed in the 2nd octave, and vise versa. Such choices are based largely off of timbre, or better said, the harmonic series, and where certain intervals (that are based on said harmonics) are located in the series.

What’s something that you would like to be able to do with technology in your work but you can’t at the moment?

Make more complex probability-based systems in Max. Ones that make choices that are more in line with how natural ecosystems function. Whereas chance events are not always absolute, or isolated, but can be reactionary to other events in the system. 

In recent months I’ve been reading up more on such natural systems. I bought a book at the Cambridge University Press bookstore while I had a few days off in Cambridge (UK) when on tour last fall. It’s called God, Chance, and Purpose: Can God have it both ways? The author, David Bartholomew, is Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the London School of Economics and Political Science.   

Essentially, the thesis of the book is that God and chance can exist together in the world, which is a highly disputed topic from both sides; theologians arguing that God is in ultimate control and scientists insisting that our world is ruled by chance (my systems operate under rules that fit them somewhere in-between these two theories). My point in reading this book is two-fold; one because I’m interested in world religion and have (self) studied it for many years now, and secondly I’m trying to gain knowledge to build these new, more reactionary systems, and learn of ways they might operate. I want to work on the concepts first, and then I will have a better idea of what technology (or aspects of Max) that I’ll need to learn and execute.

Although I’ve been working with Max for almost five years now, I’ve not gotten into it deeply because I was always busy writing new pieces and albums that focused on acoustic, electro-acoustic, and light electronics. But after recently finishing up five collaboration albums (each with different people) that will come out over the next year, I want to take a break from making albums or writing new music so I can focus on learning how to built these complex systems.

Nature, trees, focus, stillness, seemingly random patterns, chaos…and the list could go on. Lately I’ve been into the sounds of my day-to-day life; certain sounds will catch my attention, ones that seem sorta special to me. I’m trying to learn something from these sounds…though I’ve no idea what that is or means!

What is the most difficult obstacle you need to overcome in order to do your thing?

Not sure if it’s the most difficult, but a major one is the logistics and financial aspects of pulling off large-scale works that involve multiple people and/or players; and the inverse of this, which is trying to distil these ideas into works I can do on my own, which at times seems more practical. Also, navigating my own mind, figuring out how to turn my ideas into work that I’m happy with, which isn’t always easy. 

Duane Pitre is a musician and programmer with a focus on electro-acoustic, and light electronics.

mini-interview-duane-pitre

Mini Interview: Duane Pitre

Georg Hajdu

DJster Autobus is based on Clarence Barlow’s legacy real-time pitch and rhythm generator AUTOBUSK, originally running on the Atari ST computer. The device has 12 parameters which control various musical textures that encompass a wide range from tonal to atonal and from rhythmic to arhythmic structures, with strong allusions to historical and ethnic styles. The device reads text files containing the definitions of scales and meters and also opens .scl files from the scala library with well over 4000 different scales. The device improvises according to probability distributions – based on theoretical research conducted by Barlow in the 1970’s – and uses a sound font player and/or a sampler for microtonal playback. Documentation for the original program is available at http://www.musikwissenschaft.uni-mainz.de/Autobusk/

DJster derives its name from Barlow’s principle of the indigestibility of a number and  should be pronounced | ˈdīˈjestər |. I also like its similarity to jester, gesture and deejay.

The installer also contains resources for the Quintet.net and MaxScore environments as well as additional Max patches introducing the theories behind DJster.

djster

Djster

MaxScore provides standard western music notation in Max/MSP and Ableton Live

MaxScore is a Max Java (mxj) object which accepts messages that can create a musical score, add notes to it, transform the notes, perform, save, and load the score, and export the score to popular formats for professional publishable results.

MaxScore is more than a notation tool. It is an interactive performance object. MaxScore can play back a score and drive your MSP patches through an instrument interface. Scores can be created and modified in real-time and rendered as Jitter matrices. You can add notes explicitly by specifying durations, pitches and dynamic, or use Max to generate an arbitrary stream of musical events and use MaxScore’s Transcriber to notate them automatically.

The MaxScore / LiveScore Editors will give you the power of a notation environment with floating palettes, plugins and graphics with the option to  create traditional or graphical scores and to export them to pdf. 

MaxScore provides standard western music notation in Max/MSP and Ableton Live
MaxScore is a Max Java (mxj) object which accepts messages tha

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