Andrew Spitz

All the programming was done with Max with the firmata loaded onto the Arduino :-)  

super-angry-birds-a-diy-tangible-controller

Super Angry Birds - a DIY Tangible Controller

genfu

This patch affects graphical effects of the game Quake toward a more delirious aesthetic.  It works by sending automated keystrokes from the patch to the game, receiving logfile information from the game and enabling the production of a matching soundtrack which can be played back within the patch.

project48-quake-delirium

Quake Delirium

Gregory Taylor

Beyond the embarrassing confession that I don't own a Playstation or Gamecube or even an Atari, there's the issue of me and splatter gaming in general. While it's great to stick a game controller into the USB port of my laptop and have the Max hi object do the rest (with a tip of the hat to the perspicacious Ben Nevile), I'm just not into fragging my way out of dungeons. I suppose I don't mind driving or flying, but body fluid as a wall accent isn't my ball of twine. At first I thought that it was just Lara Croft anxiety, but my therapist assures me that's not it.

Some part of me--my museum gland, maybe?--is a sucker for games that involve wandering around abandoned poorly lit faux-ancient places solving bizarre puzzles as a form of virtual relaxation.

And virtual is right. There's no one sniggering at me while I try for the umptyninesquillionth time to twist the cleverly inlaid tree rings so that the glyphs spell out the word "kohlrabi", and the places, though they be some kind of twisty Celtic baroque interior mash-up, exude a decidedly unthreatening oddness. The mysteriously vanished peoples left no appreciable trash, no rumpled duvet, no coffee cups. Who are these people, anyway? Come to think of it, there aren't any toilets or teacher's lounges, either.

Come the end of September, I get to do it all over again (just in time for the Fall airport-passenger-lounge-while-en-route-to-the-trade-show gaming season). The fourth (or fifth, sixth, or seventh, depending on your count) installment of the Myst franchise is coming. If you click here, you can stare at it and mess around, solve a few easy puzzles, and look at screenshots, and download demos. Thanks to the technology improvements introduced in Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, I have an old bald goateed avatar with glasses and a semi-non-ectomorphic physique wandering around in the ruins on my behalf. He can even dog-paddle. It's so immersive, yo.

If you prefer less geeky and more decidedly worldly forms of browser immersion, I would be no friend to you at all were I not to direct you to the mother lode to end all mother lodes for remote tourism (and one of the best possible answers to the question, "Where did my afternoon/evening/day go?")--Hans Nyberg's panoramas.dk site. Just the thing if you're looking to load your Jitter objects with Mount Everest or Mars.

Either way, adventure is a point and a click away, cheaper than a plane ticket, and you won't be wondering what that funny smell is.

Beyond the embarrassing confession that I don't own a Playstation or Gamecube or even an Atari, there's the issue of me and splatter gaming in general...

mozillas-in-the-myst

Mozillas in the myst

Yiannis Ioannides

Max was used to built the entire audio-front end of this project, which is the game audio middleware itself.

talktome-adaptivedynamic-audio-prototyping-for-video-games

[.talktome]: adaptive/dynamic audio prototyping for video games

rupadhillon

Everything, except the microcontroller code, is programmed in Max. Max loads all of the levels, handles the music, and sends the signals to the vibrating motors in Rock Vibe's electronic wearable. It also handles scoring and all forms of interactivity.

rock-vibe

Rock Vibe

Lilli Wessling Hart

Cycling '74

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Self-Portrait, Dusk, at the Point of Departure

Ben Houge talks about his Expo '74 workshop.

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