Max~

MellowTron was designed per the request of a musical theatre company for their production of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins. In order to facilitate audio playback in a hostile space (not a theatre/concert hall), a patch that could quickly read in a large amount of audio files, list them in any order the user desires, and play them back in an efficient manner triggered by MIDI controller was required. In this case an AKAI MPK Mini 25-key was utilized.

The patch utilizes a specialized abstraction that uses most of the features of the polybuffer~ object. This allows for fast read in of a folder and the ability to reorder samples through a coll object. From there, the samples are read in through the KeyAssign subpatch, which allows for immediate assignment of samples to keys on the MPK. Use of the stripnote object allows for Start/Stop capability without holding down the key while the sample is playing. The next step in the project is to integrate UDP control of projections through jitter.

MellowTron was designed per the request of a musical theatre company for their production of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins. In order to facil

mellowtron-dynamic-multiple-sample-playback-for-musical-theatre-applications

MellowTron - Dynamic Multiple Sample Playback for Musical Theatre Applications

Andrew Benson

We rolled out of bed and into our suits this weekend to attend the annual Audio Engineering Society (AES) conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, a mere 5 blocks from our SOMA office. We occupied a small piece of real estate in the shadow of the big Mackie booth, and directly across from a booth featuring big reels of magnetic tape.

The show gave us an opportunity to show off Max 5 for the home crowd. We brought plenty of little patches to introduce new users to the Max experience and experienced users to the new features and interface. On day three, Gregory brought out his Monome 256 to show off some of the things people can do with this beautiful controller and Max. For our big display, Darwin patched together a slide-show style display that would open to reveal that it was in fact a Max patch.


Gregory and I worked the front of the booth, giving visitors a guided tour of the new Max from our laptops.

We got lots of interested booth visitors this year, most of them looking for a personal tour of Max 5. We talked to many folks who had been waiting for years to start using Max, and found the new documentation and UI features enough incentive to finally take the plunge. There were also a lot of long-time Max users who wanted to see what all the fuss was about. A surprisingly small number of visitors asked questions like, "What is Max?" In fact, we were all impressed by the quality of conversations we had with people at a trade show seemingly dominated by fancy microphones and expensive mixing consoles. By the time each day ended, we would just about collapse in exhaustion, having met so many wonderful individuals.

This year's AES also gave an opportunity for some of our new office crew to get out and shake hands. Cait, our new sales person, toured the floor with Lilli, meeting some of the distributors and colleagues that she'll be exchanging emails with.

Besides our core trade show crew of Gregory, Darwin, and me, we were joined by Cait, Lilli, Ben B., Kane, Mr. Zicarelli, and Emmanuel Jourdan. Although they're a lot of work, trade shows like AES offer us a rare opportunity to hang out with our telecommuting co-workers like Gregory, Darwin, and Emmanuel.

After we wrapped things up at AES, it was off to Safari West to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Cycling '74 with all of my co-workers and their families. Now back to the office, we're working on the details for our first ever Max user's conference, Expo '74.  Be sure to clear your calendars, and stay tuned for more information, as it's going to be a fantastic event.

a-look-back-at-aes-2008-in-san-francisco

A Look Back at AES 2008 in San Francisco

Cycling '74

This year, we decided to set up shop at the 3rd annual Bay Area Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA. Last year, Cycling '74 shared a little corner of a booth with the nice people at MakingThings, and that was enough to get us hooked on this crazy annual celebration of all things DIY and electrified.

We found MakingThings inside the Shed, and we got a little 10'x10' booth in Expo Hall, not far from the hourly Tesla coil demos. We set up a couple of computers running a MIDI-controlled synthesizer patch, an Arduino I/O demo, and a small collection of Jitter patches.

We're used to being the odd-ball company in the corner of fairs and trade shows, so it was a thrill to see so much MaxMSP and Jitter expertise being demonstrated at the Maker Faire. A lot of our friends and long-time users stopped by the booth to say hello and take a peek at Max 5. The Cycling '74 booth was a real hub of activity. We also got to meet a lot of great new people in the Expo Hall and hear about their awesome projects.

Here are some project highlights from the show that use Max:

 Josh Boughey brought along a couple of friends to help promote his Stribe controller, a uniquely designed fader box inspired by the Monome project. It was great to finally see the Stribe in person and meet the nice people behind it.

 Over at the CNMAT table, Adrian Freed and Michael Zbyszynski were demonstrating some peculiar interfaces built with new conductive materials and Michael's experiments in molecular gastronomy (carrot caviar anyone?).

Nearby, Jitter power-user Peter Nyboer was Maxing it up with his Livid Ohm controller and a couple of Percussa AudioCubes.

Perry Hoberman had a fantastic 3D viewing project on view that used Jitter's OpenGL to do some great tablet-controlled 3D sketching. Maybe it's our love of anything to do with 3D glasses, but we had a lot of fun watching it in action.

 Also on hand were Guillermo Galindo's Max-powered sound robot MAIZ.

The Guitar Zeros show how combining gaming, music, and computers can be a beautiful (and fun) thing.

ALERT (Active Learning Environment with Robotoic Tangibles) allowed people to interact with the iRobot Roomba by placing tiles on the floor that it can recognize.

 And there was Anomaly: an interactive adaptive scupture/installation (metal sculpture of a tree with spinning bicycle wheels combined with sensors, MidiTron and Max). The scultpure acts as a sound generator and controller.

While we enjoy seeing all the Max-related projects, we don't miss other Maker Faire highlights like the giant, rolling cupcakes and all the pedal-powered projects including a soundstage for performances.

a-look-back-at-maker-faire-2008

A Look Back at Maker Faire 2008

Marsha Vdovin

Some of us listen to many different types of music and are open to experimentation but, correct me if I'm wrong, sometimes the music that comes out of academic circles can be cold and dry. DR.OX is a welcome change. I had the pleasure of interviewing one half of DR.OX, Natasha Barrett, and I found her focused, enlightened and outspoken.

Tell me about your background -- where you're from, your childhood, and your education. Are you English?


I am, yes. I'm from the west of England -- a small forest area called the Forest of Dean. It’s very rural, not very close to any big cities. So I lived there until I went to university in London. I spent seven years in London, so it was kind of a shock moving from a forest to living in a big city.

Yes, I was actually. I was doing the normal stuff like playing various instruments and such.

Classical guitar was my main instrument, and also cello. Classical instruments. I took classical guitar right the way through university, taking lessons at a music conservatoire at the same time as my normal university education. And yes, I thought I was going to be a classical guitar performer! I soon found out I was not good enough, and I actually didn't want to do that at all. [Laughs.] So then things changed quite a lot. I guess at school, prior to university, I was finding myself more and more in the dark corner of the music room where they had a few more interesting things like some old tape recorders and keyboards, which were normally dominated by a few boys, but if you went at the right time of day, there was access. [Laughs.]

City University. I went there directly after finishing my school education, so was at university at nineteen, then stayed continuously through my degrees.

I took a music degree for my first degree. And the thing is, at the university I went to, it wasn't the normal music degree. It was actually a BSc, a science music undergraduate degree. We learnt about acoustics, music technology, perception and psychology, a lot of things that you didn’t normally get in a music degree at most other universities, at least back then. Maybe you do now, but this was back in the early '90s. In most music undergraduate degrees in England you normally didn't have much to do with science or music technology. But now things have changed quite a bit.

The '90s in London. How fun! So when you were in — well here they call it high school — you started to show some interest in electronics, in the stuff that the 'guys' were doing?

Before I went to university, when I was at normal school in the '80s, I had a strange background because my parents would not allow any kind of pop music to be played at home. My dad was into classical music, and so all I heard, really, was classical music. But that was fine I guess – he had a good hi-fi! But then at school -- I guess a around the age of twelve or fourteen I found these other things, you know? What does this keyboard do? And what was this tape recorder? I could start doing some other stuff -- and its stuff I'd never really heard up until that time because of the restrictions at home. So I was playing with sounds without actually knowing much about what was going on in the more interesting pop music that some of my friends were getting into, like New Order, Kraftwerk and more interesting stuff that came before the '80s pop music [Laughs], stuff that was in fact already historic! So I guess I was playing around without actually realizing what I was doing. A lot of accidental things. Then university in the '90s started to add some clarity. Understanding the new sound technology, insight into some of the things you could do with it, without feeling you’re reinventing the wheel, if you see what I mean.

So when you went to university did you rebel, and delve into pop music at all, and go to clubs and things?

I guess a little bit. But it was a difficult time, because then -- the early '90s pop music and leftovers from the late '80s was -- well I mean, dire. I thought it was awful! [Laughs.]

That was when grunge came into the scene.

Yeah, right. I don't think I ever rebelled against anything. I just found things, and I thought. "Oh, wow! All right. OK." It wasn't really a rebellion because I was still playing cello in a classical orchestra, and I was still playing classical guitar as a main performance instrument. So the idea of rebelling in that situation doesn’t really come about. It's a discovery. It's about finding out things. And also, at City University I arrived at a time when echoes of the composers like Alejandro Viñao and sounds made by the Fairlight system still hung in the air. So already there were interesting things left over from the previous generation of students and composers.

Did you have any strong mentors at that time?

No, not really. Discovery was what drove me, so I was listening to as much as I could. Everything was so fresh, so new. The library was quite well stocked and I was getting into most of the computer music CDs because of sound. I found what sound could be -- away from an acoustic instrument -- and that was a really important thing. Also, away from a keyboard and away from MIDI. Finding what else you could do when you start to work with what was actually then mainly tape techniques.

Why do you think you had this inquisitive, creative mind, and you just didn't stay in the classical world? Do you think its just part of your character, or was there something, the way you were raised, or something that happened?

I don't know. I can't answer that question. I remember there are a few very clear memories I have from when I was quite small. One of them was--I guess all good mums send their daughters to dance classes, and my clearest memory is the sound of the whole group of small children tap dancing. The sound in the room, this enormous boom of sixty little children tap-dancing. Things like that. I have this very clear auditory memory, but I don't have memories of dancing. I can't dance to save my life anymore! But sounds I seem to remember quite well. Obviously the memory is probably better than the actual reality. I'm sure I remember it in a much fuller fashion than it really was. You remember what you want to remember. My memories are often audio memories, more than visual memories.

I finished my doctoral degree in England, and at that point you have three choices. Choice number one is be unemployed and poor, and try to work as a composer. Choice number two is to get a job, probably in academia and really not have much time for composing, and number three is to leave the country. So I chose number three and found a research grant to be in Norway for one year. So that's how I first got here. And then I stayed.

Do you work as a composer? Do you have an academic job?

I don’t have an academic position. I'm freelance, composing non-commercial music.

I know, that's why I'm here. [Laughs.] There aren't many countries in the world where you can survive working with contemporary composition -- non-commercial, experimental composition.

So that's what I do. But having said that, life isn't just sitting and composing all day. I present master classes and I travel a lot making concerts. I'm also working with all kinds of sound related media. But the point is being able to choose, rather than having to go to a fixed job every day. So I do teach, but I can chose what to accept. And as a matter of fact, teaching master classes is interesting because each time you are challenging yourself, designing something specific for each context without repeating it each year, and normally with a bunch of interesting students. So I know I'm quite lucky, actually. [Laughs.] I think there are a lot of people, friends I have back in England who maybe wouldn't mind having a position with a bit more flexibility. But it's not a high-income life -- though enough to live off.

That's so inspiring! So let's talk about Max/MSP. When did you first get exposed to Max/MSP, and start working with it?

Well, you know, I was working with Max before MSP came out. At that time I was using MIDI to control keyboards and samplers. Also in Max there was a little play object that accessed sound directly off disc. This object gave a performer some flexibility -- you could trigger and overlay sounds of any duration instead of having to play with a fixed tape part. At that time this was about all the real-time audio you could do with cheaper computers other than basic sound effects, and samplers had too little memory for working with long sounds. I only have one composition for instrument and tape from that period -- all my work with performers was with Max, mainly using this little play object to synchronize, in real-time, layers of pre-made material.

My first MSP piece was in '99. I thought, "Wow." I couldn't afford an [IRCAM] ISPW signal processing workstation, which was the main alternative before MSP came out. So finally being able to do this stuff on an everyday computer. I mean, in software! [Laughs.] That was great, yeah. I first composed a work called "Diabolus", which is for soprano, percussion and computer. And that was really good fun. I began discovering immediacy in electroacoustic performance that was more than using an SPX90, sampler, or some external outboard effects unit.

Well... two objects actually come to mind, which are both homemade objects. One's called essence~, and it's an FFT object that tracks pitch, amplitude and centroid (the average amplitude-weighted frequency within one FFT window. Its used as a measure of the brightness in the sound). Essence~ is pretty CPU efficient as all three processes are in one object. Essence~ feeds into a second object called vecstat~. This object works out the average, the standard deviation and the average of the magnitude of the derivative for pitch, amplitude and centroid data within a user-interactive time frame. I use these objects mainly when working with live performers, to analyze what's coming into the computer and automatically extracting numerical information useful for all sorts of things. For example as control data for other sound manipulation objects, for transformations over short and long time spans and so forth. There is in fact another object that goes with essence~ and vecstat~ called statlib. Statlib takes the output of vecstat~ and works out whether a sound type has previously been 'heard' by the system and how 'far away' the new sound is from the existing pool of sound. It constantly updates itself. The three objects were originally designed by me then programmed by someone else for one of my interactive installations. When I think about how I work with MSP, I don't use many high-level objects. I guess I've always been building big patches out of simpler low-level objects. For example I like biquad~, and also work a lot with recording live sound into buffers and dislodging time so you don’t always get immediate cause-effect actions. So not always working with immediate sound transformation, but recording and allowing the temporal domain to be shifted around quite a lot.

Can you talk more about how these objects came about?

They are programmed by Øyvind Hammer. He wrote a lot of signal processing software many years ago for the Silicon Graphics machines, which I used quite a lot when I first came to Norway. Øyvind programmed these three objects a few years ago, initially in Pd, then later in MSP. They were made for an installation, which is a permanent, public-space interactive work that amongst other things analyzes sound as a way to determine how the installation interacts with the visitors. I guess MSP now has other objects that do these things, but not at the time my objects were made -- and then you get used to using something -- you know its stability and I guess we like to stick to our favorites.

Yeah, right. [Laughs.] But having said that, there's always a new little twist to things coming out all the time.

Do you use other music software programs, or sequencers or anything?

Well, you know, my composing life is separated into two parts, two main things. One is live or real-time work and one is studio composition. In the studio I work quite differently than with live performance. There are many differences. Live performance needs to be completely stable. I have quite an old laptop -- I'm going to buy a new one this year, but you’re not only restrained by your CPU, you're restrained by your brainpower, thinking speed. That's the biggest problem at the moment, at least for me. Computers are pretty fast, you can build these big Max patches, you can do so much, but does your brainwork quick enough to actually work with it live? I guess it's a brain problem for me. [Laughs.] Am I thinking quick enough? I use all kinds of things in the studio that I wouldn't use live, simply because they're maybe not stable enough, or they're not completely real time, or I need 'non-real time' to consider the meaning of the result. It's different processes, compositional process and creative process.

Do you use any type of mixers, controllers, or any alternate controller-type of gear?

Live, or in the studio? Live, I guess, because that's what we're talking about, isn't it? I have this Peavey fader box, which is one of my favorites, simply because it's small and so reliable. You get the same thing each time -- you know what you're going to get out of it. But I also use foot pedals, and I have homemade controllers made out of various sensors for different kinds of proximity interaction. I've also been using accelerometers and gyroscopes, but find it's quite a big thing to wire your hands or an object with an accelerometer and a gyroscope and actually use that information in a meaningful way. I find they're quite difficult to control. So these types of sensors I use to get 'surprise', but it's not something that I would necessarily use as the main controller. So the Peavey box gives me the security, you could say, and then sensors like the light sensors and gyroscopes give the surprise. [Laughs.] Yeah, surprise is good.

I love your CD. I just find it so exciting, and one of the most exciting things to me is hearing acoustic instruments with electronic instruments, and working with Cycling '74, you can believe I've heard so much computer music…

Oh, I bet. I guess you're listening all day, if you need to.

This is just so exciting to me. I was gong to ask you how did you make this choice to work with both electronic and acoustic instruments, but it seems like that's really been a long time coming, that that's something that developed within you a long time ago.

Yes, it is. I went into a phase, and I guess I am still in that phase to some extent -- where I found it problematic working with an acoustic performer. I was in this ‘acousmatic’ world, where the live, visual performer had no meaning, had no purpose. Now I've come round a bit from that. But even then, when I wrote a piece for instruments and electronics, I really had no care for what this person on stage looked like, and the fact that he or she was there was an annoyance more than a feature. I was only interested in the sounding result, the music, not the visual and live part of the performance. But now I've come round somewhat from that, and take advantage of the visual and the live part as a thing which is good, rather than a thing which is getting in the way of the listener’s reception of the meaning in the sound. I mean working with Tanja is great. I couldn't think of working, at least in an improvisational way, with a performer who wasn't open to their sound-world and didn't also have a high technical skill. And she's great. Tanja has a very good technical skill and she's very open to sound. It means we can play together and actually work on the sound, and on what we're doing, rather than discussing technical issues, and feeling limited by each other.

One of the exciting things to me was your use of space, silence. Something that I think a lot of young composers don't really take advantage of. Do you consider this space as instrumentation, as a third instrument, almost?

I don't think of space as instrumentation as such, more as tied up within the sound. We're talking about temporal space here, yes? Rather than spatialisation? These two things are for me related, quite strongly.

It's kind of the pauses, or the use of silence.

Yes, if we're thinking about temporal space, I feel that first of all a sound needs, it needs a certain time to be heard, to be understood. If you cut it off then you understand it in a very different way than if you allow it to continue. It has a natural progression, and silence, even if it's a very tiny moment of silence, changes how you listen to the next sound, and how you remember the sound before. I don't really see it as instrumentation, I see it as being a blank canvas, you could say, which you put things into. So the silence helps you work out whether you're defining something as a small entity, or whether you're looking at a much larger map. If you cut out silence, then you can be looking at a very large, single entity. If you bring in silence, then I think you can start to define counterpoint more easily; you can start to define simultaneous complexity more easily, without it falling into a grey, or a grayscale. Does that make sense?

Yes, that is a very interesting point. I actually have one thing I'm confused about, about this release. Is this a studio production, or is this a recording of a live performance?

The material on that disc was a two-hour recording session, and then we took the best from that. Actually, we had two days of two hours, but one day we found we just weren't playing well, and most of that was ditched. So these are 99 percent live improvisation takes. The cello and the computer have been recorded simultaneously on separate tracks, so that we can control the mix, because what you do live on stage, mix-wise, is maybe different to what you do for a CD [studio] production.

What did you use to mix? Did you use a software program, Pro Tools?

Yes, we recorded straight into Pro Tools and then mixed it. It was a very simple production.

Did you use any effects plug-ins on the mix?

The only plug-ins are EQ and compression. There are no effects as such [in the mixing stage]. Everything is done live, all the sound manipulation is done live in Max/MSP in real time. I don't see much point in doing it otherwise, or else I would be composing 'acousmatically' in the studio, which defeated the object of what we're doing. The point of this, for us, was to make a disc which was the two of us 'live', playing together, not me composing in the studio. The only thing which isn't 100 percent live is the actual duration. So maybe an improvisation lasted ten minutes, and we've taken the best chunk, which was maybe three or four minutes of that.

How much time did you spend composing before you recorded? Or how much is improvised?

All the material is improvised. You could say the composition part is making the Max/MSP patch and rehearsing together. I never used to care so much about improvising live. I wasn't that interested in just pure improvisation. I wanted to find a way to combine improvisation with a bit more control, in the sense of a composition. So I build MSP patches where I can set up compositional structures controlled in a live way. So, for example, things to do with how sound is processed and layered, how it's mixed and refers back to previous moments as you're playing, to try and create a performance which isn't just a point-to-point improvisation, but something which combines spontaneity and control in terms of the moment and in terms of the longer duration structures. I don't know what Tanja's going to play next, but I have to try and respond to that, and find meaning, with respect to what we've done a minute ago, in the improvisation. And that ties in more with this crossover between composition and improvisation. You could say that the compositional structures programmed in the MSP patch helps overcome the 'brain problem' I mentioned earlier. But the material is completely improvised in the sense that it's all done live. There's no processing or remixing in the studio. It's really just selecting the best bits.

Tanja Orning and Natasha Barrett of DR.OX

It was very inspiring for me that you're a woman in this arena. It's warm, it's not this cold, electronic sound, and there's so much emotion. It's just very exciting to me.

Great! This is one of the reasons why, when I improvise, I want to work with an acoustic performer. I don't think I could improvise with just electronic sounds. But working with a live performer with an acoustic instrument, you get a quality, a complexity.

That's what is makes it exciting for me, definitely. Is there anything you'd like Cycling '74 to do? What could they do to Max that help? Do you have a wish list?

No, I don't have a wish list. I have more a request, a wish for them to keep working on it, you know, because Max has been tossed around so much, from IRCAM and Opcode. It needs to have a place where it is stable and it gets constant support. I have an installation, which is a permanent, public-space installation, and in Norway, if it's state commissioned, it has to be running for twenty years, yes twenty years, for an interactive computer installation! So I used Linux. I couldn't use anything that was commercial, because there would be no 100 percent guarantee that in twenty years' time, the software would still exist. And when the computers need changing out, you're going to recompile everything for the new system. So I think that's the most important thing, to keep performance based systems maintained and developed over a long period of time. How to make your work live many decades, when it's based on a certain kind of technology...

That's a really good point!natashabarrett.org

 Interview by Marsha Vdovin for Cycling '74.

Some of us listen to many different types of music and are open to experimentation but, correct me if I'm wrong, sometimes the music that comes out of academic circles can be cold and dry. DR.OX is a welcome change. I had the pleasure of interviewing one half of DR.OX, Natasha Barrett, and I found her focused, enlightened and outspoken. 

an-interview-with-natasha-barrett-of-drox

An Interview with Natasha Barrett of DR.OX

Lilli Wessling Hart

POPULAR PLUG-INS NOW COMPATIBLE WITH INTEL MACS

San Francisco, CA • September 22, 2006 - Cycling '74, a San Francisco-based music software company, today released Pluggo v. 3.6, Hipno v. 1.1, Mode v. 1.3 and UpMix 1.1 which add Universal Binary support for Intel-based Macs. The plug-in collections are for RTAS, VST and AU host environments.

Pluggo offers over 100 creative and unusual real-time audio effects and a set of elegant and immediately effective synthesizers and samplers. In addition, users can create custom plug-ins using Max/MSP, Cycling ’74’s award-winning companion authoring software. The Hipno collection is an irresistible mix of granular, spectral, and filter/delay-based plug-ins that feature the unique Hipnoscope morphing interface. The Mode plug-ins combine classic synthesis and effects technique with state-of-the-art performance control, and UpMix, the most recent plug-in package, is a series of immersive 5.1 tools for the surround professional.

Free updates are available for download at https://cycling74.com/downloads

Cycling '74 creates and distributes Mac OS and Windows software and hardware for audio, video, and new media innovators. Products include the Max/MSP/Jitter graphical programming environment, the Pluggo, Mode and Hipno collections of Max/MSP-based audio plug-ins, the Radial loop-based composition and performance system, the Octirama and UpMix advanced surround design tools, and the interactive algorithmic composition program M. Cycling '74 also releases creative musical works through their c74 recording label and audio source libraries for musicians, sound designers and media producers through its Cycles series. https://cycling74.com

Graphics available online at https://cycling74.com/pressimages.

Cycling '74, 379A Clementina Street, San Francisco, CA 94103, 415-974-1818, info@cycling74.com

Cycling '74, a San Francisco-based music software company, today released Pluggo v. 3.6, Hipno v. 1.1, Mode v. 1.3 and UpMix 1.1 which add Universal Binary support for Intel-based Macs. The plug-in collections are for RTAS, VST and AU host environments. 

cycling-74-releases-entire-line-of-plug-in-products-for-mac-intel

Cycling '74 Releases Entire Line of Plug-in Products for Mac Intel

Gregory Taylor

jhno, a.k.a. John Eichenseer, is the culprit responsible for many of the plug-ins in the Pluggo collection. A musician and programmer living in San Francisco since 1994, jhno can be found DJing chill rooms in the bay area as well as experimenting with live collaborations in the diverse local scene. In this 1999 conversation with Gregory Taylor, jhno talks about his history, the minimalist musical tradition, and some of his favorite non-musical stimulus.

I started playing piano when I was four-years-old, lessons... my parents basically compelled all of my siblings and myself as well to take piano lessons, and it has stuck with me longer than any of them, I guess. I ended up playing piano all the way until high school where I started studying jazz with the local band director who was a jazz pianist. At that time I still really couldn't play, I had no conception of improvisation or jazz harmony, and it wasn't until I went to college at the University of Texas at Austin that I really started to understand jazz and be able to play it with any degree of authenticity or authority.

So, at the same time I took an early interest in electronics and computers - probably found it in my father's vocation as an electrical engineer - and started working with electronics when I was a junior in high school. The first computer I programmed was a patch-bay Heathkit boolean logic sort of educational computer where you'd connect and-gates and or-gates with little cords that were each carrying five volts, wire them to switches and lamps, and watch your little logic operations play out. Then, my dad built a Heathkit 8080, and I programmed that in octal machine code until finally, when we got the big 64k board, we could load Basic from a cassette - and I just moved on from there. By the time I was in high school, trying to think of what I wanted to do in college, it was pretty clear that the two threads of interest were computers, on the one hand, and music, on the other.

So I elected to go to a school to study computers and started doing that at UT Austin, but by the time that I completed about three semesters I realized that if you stuck with a degree program long enough to actually graduate, you come out the other end really thinking like a computer scientist. The course work involved in as rigorous a discipline as that really changes the way that your mind works and it has a huge effect on the way you spend your time, and I realized, fortunately a little early on, that that wasn't exactly who I wanted to become and that wasn't how I wanted to spend my time. I decided to switch my major to music instead. I took a degree in music, a very general degree that let me study jazz and classical music theory and composition, and especially ethno-musicology and electronic music as well. The main reason I chose UT Austin is because I knew they had some electronic studios and I wanted the opportunity to use some equipment, because I never had much. I had been scurrying around with a couple keyboards and tape decks, just whatever I could get my hands on, but there was precious little access to equipment throughout high school and junior high. Eventually I was able to work in the studios at UT Austin and kind of cut my engineering teeth there, learning about mixing and recording.

There are people who claim that the kind of formalisms you have to do to make music and the formalisms necessary to handle a degree of abstraction that certain kinds of computer science require are similar - so we get the old saw that musicians make good engineers. I hear you suggesting that they might be at war with one another.

I think that they're different worlds. There are a lot of computer or math people that are interested in playing music, and vice versa. But I would say that, generally speaking, in my experience in both of those worlds, the really brilliant computer scientists - or scientists of any sort - and the really brilliant musicians are generally mutually exclusive sets. I have found that the musicians that I have a great degree of fondness for tend not to be very computer literate, and the people that I know that are really good at computers, if I listen to their music, a lot of times it sounds like the kind of music that I would expect a computer scientist to make. That's not always the case, there are exceptions. I think maybe now, in this modern age, those exceptions are starting to become more common. The problem is really, I don't think it's an inherent exclusivity of these realms or them being at war with each other, it's just that in the human life span, and with the human size brain, there's only so much time in the day, and only so much you can do with your life. Music is an extremely demanding discipline and it takes your entire life to get anywhere musically, and to develop yourself as a musician. With computers it is kind of the same way, to get into it very deeply takes a lot of time, and so it's been rare that people have been able to do both in the past. I think it's becoming more common that people can bring them together now simply because computers are accessible enough, and perhaps even music education, well... I guess music has always been accessible. I think that basically, people are able to spend more time focusing on developing both of those aspects within themselves and actually produce a satisfying synthesis between them. Maybe that's a reflection of the state of technology - maybe that computers are becoming more accessible.

I suppose that every musician is a kind of transitional figure in that respect - probably every period of musical practice finds you suspended between one thing and another. You sort of set off navigating by dead reckoning toward a goal, and the winds of history or circumstance come up and blow you off course, and the sort of zigzag you make as you try to tack [to] the place you want to go... it just happens that now it's technology. For not being an engineer, you're fairly familiar with both the use of technology and tools and the interplay between the tools that you use in the works that you do.

Right, well I've made my living as a computer programmer ever since I went off to college, working my way through school as a systems administrator. When I got out of college I didn't start being a musician, I started working for a software start-up doing things that had nothing to do with music, and then on the side I was playing in jazz bands and writing music for modern dance. So those things were very separate and that's why I came here to the Bay Area to try and integrate them, which, as it happens, worked out better than I could have ever foreseen.

What you're saying, music and technology have always had a very intimate relationship... certainly currently the focus is on computers as a very pure and advanced instantiation of technology, of technology as a force in human history. I think you can trace relationships between music and technology throughout the course of history.

Sure. It seems to me that the difference there is that to the extent that any musical instrument is the result of an on-going community argument about how to convert some kind of force to make some kind of sound, there's a real sense in which the argument that circles around, say, a piano is more clearly articulated, and more general than we find in terms of current technology. You could, in fact, build your own piano, if you wanted to. You could build a piano with nothing but single course of strings, you could change the material. Most people don't and probably the reason they don't is because we have a pretty good idea about what we expect a piano to do. Technological instruments have either not been around long enough, or the circumstances of their generation has not been such that those agreements have been easily made, to the extent that there are any agreements… the agreements about the instruments in that rack were made by the people that designed and marketed by them, not by you. You clearly made choices over one set of things in that rack over another, but it's kind of not exactly like a piano in that sense, so the relationship is both more tenuous, it seems to me, in that lack of agreement gives you more space to work in that you may not have in quite the same way that you have with other instruments, or historically may not have occurred in the same ways.

Right. I think that what has happened that you're getting at here, is that information technology has created a sort of quantum leap in technology which has facilitated the development of instruments much more rapidly. What I'm really trying to say is difficult to express: I think that if you look at technology as a phenomenon in human history, one of the recurring themes and perhaps the primary theme of technology is the quantifying of an otherwise continuous realm - it has to do with measurement - and basically the process of the mind making distinctions between one thing and another, and putting them into categories. If you look at other technological innovations, this is what they are doing, in different ways. For example, the written language took the continuous spectrum of human vocal communication and basically categorized it into a finite set of fixed symbols and phonemes, or letters or an alphabet that could be recombined to represent really not everything that was said between people but a subset of that. When you do that, the continuous realm of expression is mapped onto a new discrete symbolic representation of the whole, and suddenly you are able to do things that you couldn't do otherwise. The symbolic representation facilitates activity in that realm in terms of communication: you can write things down, you can remember it, you communicate across great distances with more reliability.

You have ways to say what could be said, you don't have words for everything, but you have a structure that either lets you do it, or you have a situation where you can mix phonemic symbols with sort of meta-symbols that describe other relationships. The reason that Egyptian hieroglyphics were really difficult to figure out was because that no one really figured out exactly what the schema of representation were until they had the Rosetta Stone." The reason that Egyptian hieroglyphics were really difficult to figure out was because that no one really figured out exactly what the balance of... until they had the Rosetta Stone, they had this idea that you'd count the number of phonemes and you look at the number of characters that it's translated into and you realize that some of those symbols must not be functioning as phonetic units, they have to do something else, so the question is what did they do and it was very difficult to figure out. But the idea is that the meta symbol allows you to make, to sort of make different distinctions that are not merely phonemic.

Well, language is probably one of the most complex examples of this kind of technology. There are other technological innovations that I can think of...

A real simple one is making a tape. The transfer of something from the continuous domain of a bunch of guys sitting in a room, to a resulting piece of tape which is a physical, discrete object, which maps some of what happens in the room onto the tape, then you have the physical thing that you can then alter, scramble, and manipulate. That's a very simple simple version of it, but you get the idea.

Right. I hadn't thought of that particular case. What I thought of was the case of digital audio, in which case the technological innovation is more clear, I think, because you're taking the continuous wave format of pressure that is traveling through and quantifying it into discrete steps or samples that can be stored and manipulated in a computer.

Do you think that that insight depends upon the sort of mechanical transcription of the world in physical form first? Things like hygrometers, the technology of the 18th century that takes muscular movement and transduces it to recordings on tape. If you look at the French cardiologists of the 19th century - Etienne-Jules Marey comes to mind, there's this thing in him about what we do when we do... that is, we take things in the world that happen too quickly or slowly for us to see, or too gradually for us to see, or at too small an increment for us to see, and we have a way of amplifying it so that we can investigate them. Now, he's not actually using those records to manipulate the heart, but he can see something to it that he didn't when he started.

Well, that's a good example. And I think that historically all of those developments must have contributed to what we can currently do with audio, with computers. But they're not at an abstract level, I think that digital representations of sound are not...

Is that abstract level something you find more... It seems somewhat at odds with your description about what interests you about people's ability to do music without a lot of technical background. It sounds like the delightful part of what you're describing requires...

Well, I'm only describing what we were talking about with this relationship between technology and music. To kind of finish my line of thought there, the point I was making is that I think that there is this recurring theme in technology, that these innovations occur where a continuous strata is measured or quantified. We talked about the example of language - I think that money is another good example as the technological quantification of human relationships, and I think film is an example of quantifying the continuous spectrum of light into either grains on a film or, eventually, pixels on a computer screen. More relevant to the current topic is the last one I mentioned which is digital audio, where you measure a sound pressure wave in terms of discrete steps that can be sorted into a computer and manipulated, and once you can do that the range of possibilities for manipulating, changing, analyzing, and synthesizing sound opens up exponentially. Developments in the process of working with sound have... their pace has similarly increased exponentially, and I think if you look at other technological developments, the other area that I mentioned where you're measuring with language or money, you also see a similar exponential increase in activity and development that can occur once this technological step has taken place where you can now work on this representation of this system, instead of the system itself.

When you work on the representation of the system, what sort of history do you bring forward with you when you do that? What you're describing sounds kind of like operating on the representation allows you to conceive of what you do as a sort of research project, you have a different kind of material to work on now, what happens if I do this...

I think it defines another dimension of reality in which can take place phenomena with as much subtlety and aesthetic beauty as any. For example, language may be an imperfect expression of meaning, and of interpersonal communication, but language itself, the medium of language has given rise to the phenomena of poetry and literature, much of which is completely reliant on the strata in which it's conceived. The same with music. I think that if a technological innovation takes place... another good example is the development of equal tempered tuning systems that took the place of previously continuous and pure system of just intonation. Once you create a new system that contains a simpler representation than that which you were describing, then a whole new set of operations and abilities is presented to you. In the case of equal temperment, that technological innovation gave rise to music that could've never existed without it... for example, romantic music, impressionists, Ravel all the way up through jazz. The music of Bill Evans and John Coltrane could never have occurred without the innovation of equal temperment. The music that has happened since that innovation has been married inextricably to the equal temperment system in which it's conceived. I think also that if you look at the development of music, the technological innovation of equal temperment - while it left behind much of the subtlety and purity of just intonation - caused a certain quickening of novelty and a far more creative development to occur faster than before, simply because you now had a sort of simplified system that was a representation that was kind of distilled from the pure strata that it described, and then with that, because of the way that the human mind works, with this simplified symbolic system you're able to more quickly work with it, and so developments occurred more rapidly. And that's what's happening now with technology and with digital technology in particular, is that there's a similar quickening of genuinely innovative development in terms of types of music and the kind of processing and synthesis that you can do in the realm of sound.

So how does technology enter your life?  How does it change what you do or how you think about what you do?

I think that's the thing that people would be well-served to remember: that these symbolic systems that we use - whether it's equal temperment or notation, language, digital audio - they're all describing something that is much more real and much more subtle, and I think that people who work with technology and music can sometimes get a little bit lost in the aspects of working with the technological tools. In my opinion, in my own experience, music is a realm that precedes the symbolic systems that we work with: it is a more fundamental and significant reality. In other words, when I'm working with music I try to be guided by music and not by technology. You asked if they were forces at war with one another, and I think that they are, in a sense, forces that are different from each other and relating. I wouldn't say they're at war, in particular, but they are kind of different worlds, they are different aspects of human development, in a way they're sort of different spiritual domains. I prefer for my focus to remain on music - for that to be my guiding light, if you will. I'm trying to bring technology into the service of music, for the sake of music and the betterment of music and not the other way around, I'm not trying to bring music into technology to further technology. I prefer to do things for the sake of music and if I am working with technology, be it at my own studio, trying to develop my facility with technological instruments, or whether I'm programming software to make tools that I can use or that other people can use, it's all to work with music. I try to be guided not by what is interesting in terms of the technology, but really by its utility for music and its implications for music.

So a reasonable, if somewhat waggish question is, given your background in this sort of wonderful, rich electronic tradition and the tools that technology affords you, your interests in serving music as music and finding yourself in the stream of sort of improvised musical behavior, why are you doing all this godless, soulless techno-crap?

Yeah, I would've been rather surprised, I think, even three or four years ago to hear then the music I listen to now. If I would've heard it then, I would not have heard it as music, I would not have understood, it would not have moved me, my ears have rather opened up to aspects of electronic music that previously seemed to me perhaps soulless.

Can you recover what those were?  What do you think would not have been worthy of your attention?  It didn't swing?

What's most often obvious, and most often criticized about a lot of modern electronic music, especially derived from dance culture, is its repetitive nature. This is a criticism that was leveled at minimalism as it emerged from the more so-called legit music circles, work from Steve Reich and Philip Glass and Terry Reilly. Some people, when they hear that kind of music, and myself too... it requires a different kind of listening that I think, to a certain extent, has to be learned, or it requires a frame of mind, a certain sensitivity to phenomena that are taking place in the music that are different than the kind of phenomena that happen in other kinds of music, like western classical music or pop music, on which most of us have been weaned.

Do you mean in terms of time scale or attention span or rate of change?

I think those are things that people identify as empirical elements of the music that differentiate one kind from another. But, they're all hinting at some aspects of music that are more fundamental. Those parameters are important, I think, for example just time-scale has a lot to do with it. In a minimal piece, if there's a passage that's repeating indefinitely, subtle development of sound could be happening not in the notes themselves, but in the timbre of the notes, or the relative timing or pitch or volume relationships among those notes. So, somehow as a listener you have to make this leap of not just listening to the notes themselves, but listening to these other levels of activity that are occurring in the music, and I think that that's something that takes a certain amount of sophistication to be aware of. But I don't think that it takes an awareness of those things in order to be moved as a listener - I think that you can hear very repetitive minimalist music and be moved by it without having the intellectual persective to be able to describe all of these aspects that we're talking about. There's a certain sense in which those pieces, like all of music, are trying to relate emotional realities, or trying to describe relationships that exist in the world, and they're doing it in a certain way, and I think that listeners of any kind can, by hearing this music, achieve an artistic appreciation of what it's trying to express, whether or not they can analyze it and discuss all of the details of how it's implemented.

What kinds of recordings or performances sort of helped you change the way that you hear?

That's hard to say. If I try and look back on how I came to listening to either repetitive electronic music, minimalist electronic music or minimalist classical music for that matter... I mean, when I first heard minimalist composers in the world of new music, I had the same reaction - I just didn't get it, I couldn't hear what was happening, I wasn't having a musical experience, I was just bored. And there is a lot of music that still has that effect on me, but if I look at how I came to appreciate that genre of music, and how I came to recognize the examples in it that I considered to be truly great, I think, on the one hand it was just hearing pieces that did resonate with me and that had meaning for me, which is still kind of a small subset of minimalist music. A lot of it just won't work for me, it's kind of a rare piece that will.

How about the decision to actually start making it? Did you want a way to come to terms with how you thought it worked, or was that something that you discovered by virtue of the technology, the tools you were using at the time, or... ?

Well, it's interesting because you're asking me this question having heard the records I've put out already, which I don't consider to owe very much at all to a minimalist tradition, and in fact if you place them next to the other examples of electronic music which most people would place in the same category, I think in my music there's more activity and variety than most, just because I have a background in jazz and in classical music and in other kinds of music where... I like to hear a lot of things going on, I like to hear complexity. The funny part is that in about the last year I've been moving steadily toward things that are much more minimal, it's just that you haven't heard any of them yet. So you're asking about something that is a very real part of my current musical development, even though most people haven't heard it.

I guess what I was thinking about, though, is the notion of locating yourself within the genre... well, let's put it in this way: whatever your intentions, someone someplace drew some conclusion about the territory in which you work, that may not have been your intent, but it was the case, and my guess is that most people who know your name immediately would say "Oh, he does X"... we have a category of work. How did you decide to pitch your tent in that clearing?

I did not and I think that I never will because I can't, and I've tried before, but it's just not in me. What I mean is that I have been sufficiently influenced by music that I've heard, to make me want to make music that is in the same category... that is, if I listen to jazz, I'll hear great music, and that makes me want to create jazz music, it makes me want to play the piano, it makes me want to write jazz pieces... and when I hear techno music that I like, it makes me want to write a techno piece... that music is similarly affecting and I love it, but whenever I've tried to do that, it has never worked. If I sit down and try and constrain myself to write a piece that's using the elements of a real jazz piece or a real techno piece the way that they're traditionally done, the way that their genres have been traditionally defined, I can't compose in that way. I have never been a very good at constraining my creative parameters to a given genre. What I have been able to do is integrate all of those things as influences, and create music that is heavily influenced by specific genres and that owes a lot of debt to them for techniques and ideas and sounds that I'm using.

But I think, at least for myself, when I look at the music that I've made, none of it fits into these genres very well. Even the jazz pieces that I've written on the piano, it just seems to me that the harmony that I'm using... I don't really consider myself a jazz pianist, even though I've written a lot of songs, and I play out, it just doesn't seem that that's my identity, because I don't think that what I've done fits very easily into that genre, from my point of view. Obviously other listeners, and the music industry in particular, has to pile things into those genres for marketing reasons or just for people to have an understanding of what you're doing and be made aware of it. Many creative artists reflect this sentiment, that their music transcends genres or cannot really be categorized, but some artists play well within the boundaries of a specific genre. Some people play traditional jazz - that is what they're doing and they're very clear about it. People that make house music are intentionally making house music pieces. If you are trying to put out a new 12-inch in a particular style, then you stay well within the established boundaries of what happens in that genre of music. If you step too far out of line, people that are really deeply into that culture will not hear it, it might sound interesting for some reason, but it won't fit into that class of music. People have a lot of expectations, especially when it comes to dance music and its culture.

Well, I'm speaking from dialogues that I've had with people listening to music and my music and talking about what those differences are. I've made things that have integrated elements of techno or drum and bass, because I've heard that music, and some of it has really turned my crank and opened my ears to new things. So, I'll make a piece that has elements of those types of music in it and say, play it for a friend of mine - I'm thinking in particular of a DJ friend of mine, Lukas Girling in the U.K., who I worked with - and he would say that when you're making music in one of these dance genres, the music that happens... basically, new and innovative music takes small incremental steps from what is already established. If you're making a drum and bass track that is part of a particular branch of culture that's listening to that kind of music, there's only so much you can do in a single track that's going to differentiate it from the rest, it's like the track has to have all these familiar elements and then just a few things can deviate slightly...

...and it's almost like an expression of a regimented class system where people's roles in society fixed and rigid. I guess my approach is a little bit more based in the spirit of jazz, and a spirit of free-thinking and directionless innovation where I am just making pieces that sound good to me and I don't really care if they fit into a certain category or not, I just use whatever elements appeal to me. When I'm making a piece I really have the feeling that the piece itself is some sort of platonic form that already exists, that I'm trying to uncover. The worst thing I can do is try to impose restrictions of a given genre onto it... I think it's an unfortunate, almost morally corrupt thing to make something smaller and more restricted than its fully manifested self, so I think that I'm always trying to hear the piece for what it is, and let it go in whatever direction it wants, not constrained by any guidelines of style or convention.

It seems like there is a situation in which a custom is accultured, in having these kinds of modes of production, consumption and listening, and that the kind of listening you do as you move is different than the kind that you do when you sit down. So, ideally what you do meets both criteria if it's done well?

I guess. I'm not even a dancer myself to tell you the truth. I dance sometimes, but pretty rarely - so I don't feel like I have as much of an understanding of movement, of dance as some of the people that are more inside this culture and making dance music. I don't think I really make dance music, although I've seen people dance to my music - everything from people on a dance floor, to music of mine that's been used by modern dancers for formal choreography. And so obviously it can work, but that's not what I'm doing when I'm making music, I'm not thinking about the movement of a body. I guess I have a sense of rhythm enough now that I can hear the way that things swing, and I think I've become a lot more sensitive over the years to subtleties of rhythm and of things being in time or feeling good in time, and that's grown, but it's not really through moving my body. When I think about rhythm, I think more about the pacing of my mind, and the way that my thoughts occur. I listen to the internal sounds and communications happening in my own, in circuitry that is inside of me and the inside of my body and I think that there are these rhythmic relationships happening all the time within myself, and I try to be aware of them on different levels, consciously and subconsciously, and I think that's where my sense of rhythm really comes from.

 Thinking about rhythm, I wanted to talk to you about the communal aspects music making one hears with your duo project "Spool" and the work you make for yourself. In some measure, there is a sense in which one of that kind of work is heavily moment-based and collaborative... I'm thinking that as you do more improvisation on the continuum, it's more on that end, and then you find yourself in a situation where you essentially work alone, and in a situation in which technology extends what you can do in terms of allowing you to multiply yourself, and also extends your ability to make and manipulate certain kinds of noise. I mean you may not be able to play the contrabass, but you can come up with something that will function like that instead of having to find a contrabass player.

Well, if I wasn't an electronic musician I'd have to be a pipe organist because I am very fascinated with this process of being able to create complete works myself. There has never been a generation of musicians that's been able to do it to this degree, because it's very recently that recording technology has come about and that electronic instruments and synthesis technology have achieved the degree of sophistication that they have now, so I feel very lucky in that respect, because now we can create pieces that are very musically or spectrally complete, that are very complex and rich, by ourselves. I am a pretty reclusive person, my process just happens to generally be very solitary - even in Spool I end up doing a lot of the engineering and production and mixing of the pieces by myself because John Ridenour lives in Chicago. It's not because I'm a control freak, or an egomaniac - I love playing with people too and a lot of the music I make which I consider to be the strongest I've done has been due to the contributions of other people. When I play jazz I'd much rather play in a trio with a bass player and a drummer than playing a solo piano, because you can just do so much more. But there's something in me that gravitates towards solitary and contemplative activity and I think that there is a place in my musical life where these pieces are conceived, executed, and created entirely by myself.

There's a certain freedom you can achieve in that solitary frame of working that is just different from collaborating with others, and I think there's some things about it that are worthwhile. I would hate to ever do just one or the other. I would hate to just be a purely solitary musician, and never work with other people in a group, because I think that they are both very interesting modes of working musically. I would like to keep exploring them. One other thing I have to say, though, is this idea that as an electronic musician, or even as a pipe organist... or even as a pianist, the idea that you are ever truly solitary is really an incomplete and spurious notion, because you didn't build the piano, and even if you did you built it like another one... and you didn't build the pipe organ, you certainly didn't build all the electronic instruments that you're using, the sounds that you're using, things that you sample... you're drawing on the richness of the world around you and things that other people have created, and so you're still working in the context of community. You can never really get away from that, so even though I'm creating music by myself, often I'll be working with recording sounds that have come from collaborations with friends of mine, and I'm using instruments that other people have made, so there really is this richness that can only happen by the contributions of many other living human beings. So I don't want to give the impression that electronic music is really as solitary and isolating as it seems, because there are a lot of connections.

There's a sense that there are some people - here's the plug part that gets edited - in which some people probably encounter the work that you do in terms of signal processing devices that you've put together, somewhat idiosyncratically I might add, for Pluggo, in the sense that there are people who probably encounter you live by virtue of the recorded material you make, and now, by virtue of the tools you've invented, to make things that strike you as interesting. I'm curious as to the point in your musical development where this change occurred. First, your background in computer science means that you can do things that the average consumer of electronics made by other people can't do. But what is was that made you start making things that you couldn't acquire...

Well, it's a pretty recent development in my musical slash technological life, I think... in the same way that I said before that I'm a musician before a technologist, I'd rather be guided by music than technology; I'd rather prefer that to be my focus. I think that my musical output is a more full expression of myself and what I find interesting than what I can do with software technology. Be that as it may, and that said and disclaimed, I've been surprised and rather delighted to find that in the software that I've written I still see my character and creative expression. I see the same voice in my software and technological output as I do in my music. I look at them and I think the same person created these things. I like that because it indicates to me in a very personal way that technology has the capacity to be as creative and full of character - and idiosyncrasy as you say - as something like music. I have this same feeling when I see software that other people I admire have written. Things that are very idiosyncratic have an artistic and aesthetic integrity to them and a richness and a beauty that are the hallmarks of a creative person with a sense of vision. The reason I think this is heartening is that this is not always the case; in technology and software there's a lot of people making things that just seem as soulless and empty as it is often slandered, either tongue in cheek or not, like your previous question to me.

Anyway, to get more to what you are talking about, I think that I was drawn to work creatively in the realm of technology because of its capacity for self-expression, and also because if I look around at the technology that is available, I find it wanting, I wish to contribute to it and bring into being things that I think should exist, or ideas that I think should exist, or ideas that I think should be expressed in this realm. Basically, what it boils down to is that I always think that things aren't quite weird enough. In terms of technology, there are a lot of straight or expected conventions that are played out. What you can do with musical technology or sound processing tools and what I find most interesting as a consumer of them is that they are truly innovative, or that they make large leaps or do things that are extraordinary. So that's what I'm trying to do in technology as well as in music, is show what is possible, to try and find genuinely new things. Not all of them will last - not all of the music I make will, I think, stand the test of time, and I can't even predict what might. Not all the software I make will, but I think that some of it will, so I have to just basically make everything I can think of that strikes me as interesting and put it out there and let it play itself out in the culture at large and see what rises to the surface.

I think that there's an additional relationship occurring which is that if I can make interesting innovations in music technology, it just happens that those are the tools that I use to facilitate my primary expression in music, the creation of music and sound, and so by participating in the process of the tools that I use I'm enabling myself to go further and achieve a broader range in the music that I create as well. Whereas if I was not participating in this level of creating, my own tools would be restricted. It takes a lot of work to get those two processes to really feed back into each other in a useful fashion, because music feeds back into technology as well. The things that I do with computers are informed by what I've learned about music, and what's happening in my musical life, and so I think the challenge is that they really are two different worlds. While I'm writing software or putting things together on the computer, that is not the same mode emotionally or cognitively as when I'm making music - you have to shift gears a lot and if you're trying to be a musician making technology or vice versa, you have to start to be aware of this process.

If you start working with technology you have to be careful that it doesn't sweep you away, because you start to get really excited about things, and if you're becoming a true geek, that means you're probably going to spend a lot of long nights writing code and playing with little systems. That's great, but I know a lot of people who have gotten lost in that and lament its effect on their music making. If you start working on tools indefinitely, then your process of creating music and working within your purely musical world can sometimes be left behind. Like I said, they overlap a lot and back into each other, but they're still somewhat separate, and when you're working on music... when I'm working on music properly and working in the world of musical ideas, trying to shape things according to the sound, I'm not developing tools simultaneously, I'm using what's available to me. There's an extent to which you can do those at the same time, but at least for myself I consider them to be separate processes, and I have to constantly direct a balance between those so that neither one completely overshadows the other, because if you leave something behind it will atrophy. If you get out of the technology game your skills will deteriorate and become obsolete, and if you stop playing music your chops will deteriorate, and your momentum on your path as a composer... so it's really quite a balancing act to try and maintain these separate lives, but it's also a pleasurable challenge.

Okay, so we have three things to listen to, look at, and to read.  Is that right?

Okay, look at is maybe the easiest because that's the furthest away from the core of my being, just because I'm a little more into language and music, so those are harder. Probably my favorite piece of computer-based art or graphics, visual art, is Scott Draves' "Bomb," which is a multi-platform, cellular automata-based graphics program that produces organic moving imagery based on a variety of algorithms that are recombined in a way that I think is rather ingenious. Scott's become a friend of mine and we've worked together a little bit, and I have a great appreciation for cellular-automata in general. I just happen to think that his program is the best instantiation of it so far, from an aesthetic point of view, and I think that just by looking at something like that you can gain all sorts of insight into the way the world works. Other than that, I would look at the structure of plants in the real world. I also feel like I gain a lot of insight about things from the way that trees bifurcate at their branches, and if you look very closely at a flower or a tree then you will see encoded into it just a logical structure that if you understand, you can make relationships between that and music, and between that and so many things about the way the world works. Just try to imagine the DNA sequencing, and the intra-cellular processes that created the patterns that you're seeing, because it's all being generated out of these very simple replicating units that occur in all of life. So I like looking at plants.

These are in no particular order, I guess. The other... I would say that all of the elements are pleasurable to look at. Anybody can stare at a fire or ocean waves endlessly, but I like looking at the sky a lot, and that's probably also because I fly paragliders - I have a new and much deeper appreciation of wind and meteorology than I used to. If you don't want to fall out of the sky, it helps to formulate a model of what's going on. Just the motion of fluid dynamics is incredibly fascinating, whether it's the sky or watching liquids combining, it's kind of a very similar phenomenon. I just love to see things swirling around... the chaos of dispersion... so wave behavior in clouds and in water is particularly fascinating. It's great when you combine them like flying maybe 1000 feet above the coast here in San Francisco, and you're flying through the air and seeing the clouds above you, the sun shining through them, and at the same time you can look down and see the patterns of waves crashing into the cliffs in the ocean.

That's the hardest of the three, because I'd be incredibly hard-pressed to define three recommendations out of the entire world of music, so maybe I should just not even touch music at all, and talk about other things I listen to. For example, one of my favorite ongoing activities is listening to insect sounds, or other animals that make periodic, and continuous sounds - especially frogs, birds sometimes to a lesser extent, but frogs and insects really draw me in most readily. I've recorded a lot of insect sounds, I keep thinking about pieces I might be able to make from them. I don't know, I'm really fascinated by the variety and subtlety of the noises that converge in nature. If you're sitting there listening to a field of cicadas and trying to hear the patterns... because it's not just noise, they're communicating with each other, things are happening in their world, and you're just hearing the sonic representation... and trying to make conferences of adjunct stories of what really is happening, what's behind the sound.

Well, that Marvin Gaye CD is older than 20 years, but that's not really old and it's a little bit of a tangent for me. As far as old music, I would say Bach... the Indonesian Gamelan music we were talking about earlier, I have quite a fondness for that. There's so much indigenous music that's great - I really have a predilection for the Middle East and Eastern Europe, as far as folk music goes. My drummer friend Bryan Bowman turned me on to a CD called Gypsies of Rajasthan, that's great stuff - I love music from that area of the world. I love the duduk which is an instrument from Armenia (and Turkey). I got into it from hearing the famous Armenian duduk player Djivan Gasparyan and I even bought a couple of duduks and am trying to figure them out.

Yeah, I have two duduks and a box of reeds. The problem with those things is the reeds... at one point I could play, and I got some good tone. I recorded the duduk on one track of mine - it's actually one of my better tracks, at least judging from people's response to it - where after the introduction basically in the beginning of the song before the beat kicks in, I play this little simple line on the duduk and I just love it because I was able to get this big warm sound. The duduk is an extraordinary instrument, it sounds very different in real life than it does on tape, because on tape, like these recordings of Gasparyan...

Yeah, it's the most timbrally expressive, warm wind instrument that there is, but in real life it sounds much smaller and rather insubstantial, and that's because of the "proximity effect" of the microphone - the low end becomes emphasized and, as you say, bigger than life.

I think I like the idea of an acoustic instrument that is smaller than you think it is.

I'd like to hear a talented musician play one live. I've heard myself, it's not exactly the same. I still have to get out and hear that instrument sometime. At the same time, I would like to play it more, but the problem is the reeds: you pay like 15, 20 bucks a pop for the suckers and they're all different, and they end up drying out and getting screwed up.

I think they're generally just imported from Armenia.  I bought one of the duduks from Lark in the Morning. They have so much stuff, and they sell reeds too. I'd rather just travel to these countries. I'm sure you can just buy reeds there for 50 cents - of course, if you're a serious reed instrument player you make your own reeds, but I don't even know where you get materials for this stuff and it's just a whole path that I haven't been able to pursue.

That's good, that excuses me from thing number three to listen to, which might be silence, or your own brain, anyway, so that's a good call. To read, I think I'd have to first identify a book that we were discussing earlier today, which is Harmonic Experience by W. A. Mathieu, because I think that's the most informative and important book about music ever written - at least that I have seen. I haven't read all the books there are out there, but I got a music degree, and have seen enough to know what's been expressed about music. It's hard to write about music and read theories about music, and to analyze it, and to come up with things to communicate to other people, because so much of it is inexpressible or ineffable, and the people that are sensitive to that don't want to diminish or cheapen aspects of music by trying to narrow them into inadequate forms of expression by talking about it. I feel that way myself, but his book I think goes further into explaining what is really happening with music and why it is interesting to us, especially from a musician's standpoint, making music. I think he has more to say on the topic than any other source that I've come across. I was simply surprised to read that book after having studied music for almost all my life and gotten a college degree at a decent university, and I started reading that book and almost immediately it occurred to me that this is what music is about, and why didn't anybody tell me about this before. What it was to me was a validation of everything I was doing in music, because I think that when you learn traditional Western music theory, it seems very arbitrary - and in fact, it is. They are telling you, "here's the twelve notes of the scale, and here they are and these are their names, and these are the kinds of chords you have" - and a good teacher is also going to be saying: "of course, you know we're just talking about it, describing, and what you really need to do is play it, and listen to it and have this experience, and that's what real music is, right" So you do that, and then it's back to the analysis.

It just seems like it's a different world, all these arbitrary symbols and descriptions - a system that you make, and then from that comes music. That's fine, but I think eventually this viewpoint is a little bit disheartening or unsatisfying. What happened with me when I read Mathieu's book is that I realized there is a reason that music is this way, that our systems of harmony have developed over time in this way, and that's because physical objects resonate in a certain manner, and they resonate with each other in relationships that are intrinsic to the physical world in which we live. The harmonic series is found in nature and the interaction of vibrating objects, which behave according to certain rules, and what he does is talk about those rules, which I already knew, but he traces the relationship between the way that physical vibrations interact and the music that we've made. I knew that, for example, musical intervals were based on the harmonic series. I didn't know how, I just knew that there was a harmonic series, and then there's these scales that we have, which are related, but not exactly the same. What he does is tell you why. Other people have done that too, but I think that the gestalt of his explanation is more complete and satisfying than anybody else's that I've heard. [His book] draws a more complete picture of the relationship between basically just intonation and equal temperment than any other I've seen.

I guess Philip Dick has caught my ear lately.  In particular I like Valis and The Divine Invasion, a couple of his later books which I think are among his best. Everything he has written is pretty interesting - I'm fascinated by his writing style, and what he has to say. I think he was a very deep and mystical person who had an understanding of the world that is extraordinary and unique. I don't know if I would recommend him to everybody. There are certain people to whom I recommended him immediately, but I don't think that kind of fiction is for everyone. I guess if I had to recommend a book most broadly it would be Monkey: Folk Novel of China. It's a translation of a story which is more like a collection of stories about this mythical stone monkey that comes to life. It encompasses a broad swath of Chinese mythology and Buddhism and Confucianism all thrown together, with a lot of humor - generally just a thrilling book to read. Very fun. But at the same time it has the same epic scope, or the feeling of significance as other spiritual literature like the Ramayana from Hindi literature. It is taking on these heady topics, it has plenty of depth and philosophical significance, and it's also very light-hearted. Monkey is a lovable character.

an-interview-with-john-eichenseer

An Interview With John Eichenseer

rchaney541

This project uses max to interface between the qwerty keyboard and a collection of buffered sounds.

qwerty-sample-player

Qwerty Sample Player

David Zicarelli

Nine years ago, Robert Henke told me about the edit button.

Robert was in Anaheim, giving amazing Live 1.0 demos non-stop at Ableton's first NAMM booth, and before the last day of the show, we were chatting in the topiary-enhanced parking lot of Stovall's Inn. Having used Max to prototype some of the first effects included with Live, Robert told me he wanted to be able to reprogram his effects on the fly, without stopping the music, just the way everything else worked in Live. At that time, the reality for Robert would have involved translating his revised patch into a C program and rebuilding a new version of Live. This was not exactly the real-time development cycle he was used to as a Max user.

At the time, I told Robert I thought his idea was cool and that we should make it happen. But then I began to immerse myself in the details. Would we have to shoehorn the entire Max environment into Live? If not, how could you edit a patch without hearing it? None of the alternatives seemed terribly attractive. Brooding quickly set in. Fast forward nine years. After a lot of negotiating, specifying, and programming, Robert's dream is becoming a reality. It seemed appropriate to reflect on this newest evolution of our software, and why it has caused my mood to brighten considerably.

The Max device (Degrader) comes with an edit button, unlike the built-in Live device (Erosion).

From Ableton's perspective, Max is the meta-feature. Live's limits are now your imagination's limits. (Who knows, maybe they won't need to add any more features!) But what it does Max for Live mean for Cycling '74 and our users? And why did we want to integrate Max into another piece of software?

As someone whose primary career interest has been software user interfaces, I have to say at the outset that Live has been an ongoing inspiration since I first saw it. The important thing for me is Live's recognition that fluency was a fundamental goal in an interface for creative work. Particularly with version 5, we've tried to incorporate lessons from the Live interface into Max.

After Live appeared, it soon became clear that I wasn't the only one who was impressed. Live has become a preferred tool of many Max users. Live's performance orientation attracts a similar community to ours. And here's a insider tip: Ableton's MIDI, plug-in, and ReWire implementations were always the most stable we dealt with, and we actually knew people who were using the two programs together with success, on both Mac and Windows. That meant we could imagine that an integration project would have a good chance of actually working when we were finished with it!

Ultimately, it came down to this: my Cycling '74 co-workers and I have come to believe the unique thing we have to offer the world is fundamentally about programming. In other words, we want to make edit buttons, and if we can put them in places where they have never existed before, all the better. It was clear to me that Ableton understood what it meant to have the Max environment work with their software. They weren't just talking about more plug-ins.

We've been working with Ableton for more than two years to bring Max and Live together. From the outset, our goal was to create the concept of a dynamic Live device that would make the application itself seem editable. The result is not just another plug-in specification but an entirely new kind of workflow that manages to combine the interactivity and fluency of both applications without compromising anything.

Working on a complex task with another company separated by over 5000 miles and a nine-hour time difference has been an interesting challenge. Time and distance were not the only issue, however. Even though we respect each other's software tremendously, the cultures of Ableton and Cycling '74 are, within the narrow confines of audio software companies, pretty divergent. I suppose I should be careful in making comparisons between the two organizations, but I think it would be safe to say that Cycling '74 operates in a manner that, by comparison to Ableton, could be characterized as complete and utter chaos. Yet for me at least, the experience of getting to know another company and its people has been intensely rewarding. Since December 2007, when Max for Live was first demonstrated (and yes of course, it crashed!) at an Ableton company meeting, the Cycling '74 office began to receive requests for Max authorizations from Ableton employees. That was an encouraging sign for me that maybe we were on to something. For the past several years, we have actually managed to infiltrate the Ableton office in Berlin with one of our developers, Jeremy Bernstein. In retrospect, even with all the other pieces of the puzzle falling into place, it's hard to imagine how we could have accomplished this task without Jeremy being in the right place at the right time.

Even Max users who never end up with Live have benefited from this project. In addition to some of the Live-influenced changes we made to the UI design, there were features we developed for Max 5 specifically to address challenges of Live integration. For example, given the size constraints of the Live device view, we needed a better method for displaying a compact interface that wouldn't distort the logical structure of a patch. The result was presentation mode, which turned out to be a dramatic improvement for UI design for any patch. The task of integrating Max into Live has already prompted a number of innovations within the Max environment and I can confidently predict more will be forthcoming.

Finally, I want to leave you with a Max-centric perspective on what this project represents.

The most obvious thing you are probably seeing as a Max user is the ease with which you can get your Max stuff into Live, as well as share it with a new user community. But that is not the whole story. Instead of thinking about what Max is going to do for Live, think about what Live is going to do for Max. With this integration, a programming environment has just gained a set of powerful composing and performing tools. In Music-N terms, Max supplies the orchestra while Live holds the score. The "score" however is not just MIDI notes. It can be audio, triggered and manipulated in all the sophisticated ways Live provides. Or it can be automation, drawn inside Live and fed to Max as sample-accurate audio-rate ramps if you like. It's equally possible to work the other way, where Max represents the score and Live represents the orchestra.

Those are just the raw capabilities. The real magic happens when you see how it can all work together. Because we started with the requirement to support dynamically changing devices, your "score" and your "orchestra" will evolve together seamlessly. For example, if you edit a device and add a parameter to it, you won't lose the automation data you've already created for the device's existing parameters. Then there is something we have been calling preview mode. Preview mode pipes audio, MIDI, automation, and timing from Live to Max (and back to Live) while you are editing your device. The result is a sound design process that feels completely integrated from the highest to the lowest level in a way nothing else has before.

Once you experience this integration, I think you will see how it has the potential to change the typical usage patterns of both applications. Max is the ultimate workaround for out-of-the-ordinary things you need to do in Live, while Live supplies the sampling and granular audio triggering Max users often find themselves constructing. Our new Live-inspired Max UI objects, with their effortless parameter management, tie everything together, and then you save it all into a single document, ready for tomorrow's creative explorations.

That, in a nutshell, is why I like edit buttons.

David Zicarelli gives some insight on the decision to integrate Max within Live...

my-perspective-on-integrating-max-and-live

My Perspective on Integrating Max and Live

This article provides a brief tour of the features we've added to Max for creating Live devices. If you're familiar with our old plug-in development objects, we hope you'll notice the major improvements we've made. If you're new to creating Max content for audio and MIDI processing, we hope this tour will give you a flavor of the tools that will be at your disposal when Max for Live is released later this year.

Please note, the information presented here is preliminary and subject to change.

With Max, you can design an interface that will appear in Live's device view, a unique advantage over VST and Audio Unit plug-ins, whose custom edit screens appear only in separate windows. This provides immediate access to your device's UI, but the device view is somewhat constrained in terms of onscreen dimensions. This is where Max 5's presentation mode feature will come in very handy. You'll be able to arrange the elements of your interface using a device view template without messing up the patch you've created.

Patching and Presentation Modes in Max and Live. Note the horizontal line that shows the boundary of the Device View.

Max for Live introduces a new set of UI objects specifically designed to emulate the look and feel of the Live interface. But the beauty of these new objects is more than skin deep -- they share the rich set of features built into Live's native UI controls, including:

MIDI and keyboard assignment via simple point-and-click

descriptive text in Live's info view on mouseover

contextual menu for viewing automation for the UI control

automatic color updating when the user changes the Live color scheme

Live-style automation recording and playback, including the display of automation values superimposed on preset value

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