The headline says it all. Oh, sure, as if it isn’t enough to recreate the legendary EMS Synthi synth – one of the most creative vintage analog instruments ever devised – this artist takes it one step further, controlling parameters with a piece of colored paper tracked by a webcam. It’s an achievement of sheer patching genius, taken one step wackier.

The patch is entitled Le Synthé V5; the creator is Pierre Couprie. And yes, you can download this for Windows and Mac – even Mac PowerPC. Cost: US$15/EUR10, which is, I must say, insanely cheap.

Video in French with English subtitles.

Pierre Couprie | Le Synthé V5 [Description, download]

Thanks to Lee Ray for sending this in.

Novation has unveiled this week their own “free” step sequencer offering for Ableton Live. It’s some lovely work, with basic melodic pattern playback that comes alive once you add some envelopes.

It’s a cool creation — but for me, it’s massively overshadowed by a new video featuring the upcoming Renoise 2.5 beta with the same Launchpad controller.

I’ll introduce it by saying, simply… hot damn.

And what a difference you get in price. Of course, to use either, you’ll need a Launchpad, currently running around US$200. But for the Renoise solution, you need only spend an additional US$75/EUR49 for everything. For the “free” patch for Live, you’ll need Ableton Live 8 or higher plus the Max for Live add-on, which even with current sale deals will set you back US$698 (unless you own some previous software, though even then, you’re unlikely to get down to $75). Free after an investment of nearly a grand is a bit of a stretch.

Now, trackers aren’t for everyone, as with any tool, some of you own Live already, and I’m all for spending more money when you need to. So I don’t want to harp on the price issue alone, even if we are talking more than $600 (an 800%+) difference.

Instead, look at the results. Renoise’s Matrix View is simply astounding – perhaps as much so as the first time I saw the Session View in Live. Rather than being an independent patch, this is the innards of Renoise under control here. Each individual step is a pattern. It can easily retrigger notes. It can do melodic patterns, if you like, but each step can have an individual pattern, each pattern can be directly edited in your actual arrangement file using the controller. You don’t have to touch the mouse. And while fader control of additional parameters isn’t there yet, it’s coming.

Oh yeah — and it’s a video step sequencer, too. (That’s thanks to Jitter, though it’s not presently in this release because of some performance issues.)

In this case, the ingredient remains Cycling ’74′s powerful patching tool, Max/MSP. But because the standalone version of that package – unlike Max for Live – includes a free run-time, you don’t have to buy Max to use the results. Also, even Max may not be necessary in the future, as later in the year 2010, the developers of Renoise will offer MIDI control scripts, Lua scripting of the environment, and OpenSoundControl. This functionality appears to be something you’ll get with the package, not something you’ll need to spend hundreds of dollars to use. The reason Max is necessary now is simply to map the Launchpad’s someone arbitrarily-mapped bi-directional MIDI to Renoise’s eminently-controllable grid. (Jitter is, in turn, used for video output, though that could work elsewhere.) With these functions integrated directly into Renoise – something sorely lacking in Ableton Live – you’ll be able to do more, more easily. With OSC sent from a device like the monome or (hopefully soon) Livid Instruments’ Ohm line, you ought to be able to just plug in the device for direct control.

It’ll also be easier to interchange devices, whereas some of the recent Max for Live devices are tied to specific controllers.

Don’t get me wrong – these are different tools. While scripting Renoise opens up a number of terrific possibilities, it won’t do everything that Max 5 (standalone) and/or Max for Live can do. For instance, if you’re looking to build your own video sequencer, you do want a separate tool, and you may indeed want the power of being able to drop that patch creation right into Live.

The point for me is that the core program itself in Renoise is controllable here, which for certain workflows can be an edge.

Competition is good. I’m certainly inspired to work on my own step sequencer creations and trying to make them better. And Novation has lucked out here, because I expect I’ve just sold them a few more Launchpads. But sorry, Ableton – I fully expect some Renoise users to find a way to tattoo their program of choice onto the hardware, as in this mock-up. This round goes to Renoise and the ingenious work of patch creator Johann Baron Lanteigne.

Depending on your tool of choice, if you’re a Launchpad owner, go grab now – and stay tuned for more step-sequencer-on-host action. Yum.

Launchpad Step Sequencer download, on the Novation support pages. Via:

Novation Launchpad now a step sequencer

Renoise Based Audio-Video Step Sequencer [Discussion, download available now]

Previously:

Renoise 2.5: A Matrix for Everything, Modulate Everything; Full Scripting, OSC Coming

PS, Ableton, Cycling ’74, don’t feel bad. I did get to see the step sequencer creations by Little Scale last night at our party. They’re obvious choices for Max for Live, and he’s only had the Launchpad for a few weeks.

In fact, I think the best thing that could possibly happen is for all the Launchpad, monome, Ohm, Ableton, Renoise, SuperCollider, chip music, and other fans to throw down and let the out-step-sequencing battles begin.

Go.

Max for Live is a fantastic product that treads on genuinely new ground. Its level of integration with the user interface and operation of the host reaches a new high, it comes with a rich selection of instruments, effects, and tools to use as examples, and, in combination with Max 5’s re-vamped interface, makes a comfortable development environment. It does all of this inside a host that, true to its “Live” name, provides a unique workflow.

But Max for Live also comes with some significant strings attached, and it confirms some of the disadvantages to Max as a proprietary, vendor-specific development solution for music and performance. That means that it’ll be a superb choice for certain applications, but will fail to be a viable option for others.

Technology is about trade-offs; understanding those tradeoffs is essential to making informed decisions. There’s never a “right” choice; only a right choice for you. I think the music tech community will embrace Max for Live, but it’s also important to have alternatives. The DIY creative music community likely won’t – and certainly shouldn’t – simply make Max for Live and Ableton Live its tool for everything.

In summary:

1. Max for Live doesn’t have a free run-time, which means it’s not your best option if you want to reach a wide audience with your creations.

2. Max is no longer an option for people wanting to develop plug-ins for multiple hosts, a change that didn’t go over well with all developers partly because it was only revealed after Max 5 and Max for Live.

3. Jitter output while editing is crippled in Max for Live if you don’t also own Jitter.

4. Max isn’t an open source tool, which has practical implications, including -

5. You’ll want to choose something else if you’re interested in mobile music making.

You’ll want to weigh these options when considering Max for Live, even before considering the technical specifics of the tool. You may determine it’s still the perfect tool for the job, or you may not; it should simply be part of your equation.

These aren’t entirely black and white issues, so I’ll be specific:

1. There is no Max for Live run-time – meaning Max for Live is a poor choice for deployment of instruments, effects, and controller support.

This is the most significant and fundamental issue. If you create a Max for Live patch because you want to share it with other people, you should be aware that you’re limiting your audience. Anyone wishing to use your patch will need to buy both a full version of Live 8 and a full, $295 license for Max for Live. There is no free run-time, and neither Ableton nor Cycling ‘74 has indicated they plan one in the future. In fact, representatives of both Ableton and Cycling ‘74 have told me that they expect that many people will buy Max for Live at that price for the sole purpose of running other people’s patches.

Ableton and Cycling ‘74 are businesses, and this may well be the decision that’s in their best interests. Of course, you also have the right to make a decision that’s in your own best interests. If, for instance, you get commissioned by a band to make a Max for Live patch for their performances, then you might easily pay off your own cost for Max for Live – this might be a really smart way to go. On the other hand, if reaching a wide audience is your main goal, then Max for Live is probably not your best choice – particularly if you’re interested in providing support for a hardware controller in Live. (That’s part of the reason why I hope we’ll still see OSC natively supported in Live, not only in Max for Live.)

I’m not suggesting Max for Live isn’t worth its price – I actually think it could be a fantastic investment for many users. But that’s not the point: the question is, from a creator’s standpoint, does building a tool in Max for Live allow you to reach the people you want to reach? Anyone imagining a Max-style App Store for patches is likely to be disappointed with Max for Live, at least unless Ableton and Cycling ‘74 decide to change the deployment model. On the same note:

2. Max for Live marks the end of Max as a development tool for multiple hosts – a change that, whether justified or not, wasn’t clearly communicated.

One way around item #1 is to simply use Max 5’s existing – and excellent – support for producing standalone Mac and Windows applications that use its free run-time. I expect some users who aren’t as interested in Live will continue to opt for a conventional Max/MSP/Jitter license in place of a copy of Max for Live.

Unfortunately, Max 5’s versatility as a development tool no longer applies to plug-ins outside of Max for Live. The Pluggo framework had previously provided the ability to create VST, AU, and RTAS plug-ins for Mac and Windows, covering virtually every host on the market – even Pro Tools. It was included free with a copy of Max. Correction: Pluggo was a US$160 add-on for developers, including the Pluggo plug-ins bundle, though the run-time for users was free. As noted in comments, the run-time export itself was included in Max 4.5 and later. Now, Max costs just as much as it did before, but you can only target one host (Live). Not only is there an additional cost to you, but there is to your target user, too.

Again, it’s possible this change will ultimately make sense for Cycling ‘74 and the future development of Max. That’s the decision of Cycling ‘74 and Ableton. As for what makes sense in your future, that’s a different issue. You should simply be aware that if you want to create tools for hosts other than Live, Max is no longer your tool.

I’m also disappointed in the way that Cycling ‘74 made the announcement, and I think I’m obligated to express concern about that. When Max 5 was announced in September 2007 – by which point (according to Ableton’s press release today) work had already begun on Max for Live, this is what Cycling’s David Zicarelli told the user base:

“[Pluggo] is unlikely to be ready when Max 5 is first released. If your life revolves around plug-in development, you’ll probably want to wait to upgrade until we change our plug-in support to work with the new core environment.”

(See CDM’s article from that month.) That certainly implied support was coming when it was not. There was no mention at the time that the replacement would cost money, would no longer provide a free run-time, and would only work in Live. When Max 5 was shipped, there was still no news. When Max for Live was announced in January 2009 at NAMM, there was still no mention of the status of plug-in development in Max. It was only in May 2009 that Cycling ‘74 formerly announced it was discontinuing work on Pluggo and effectively ending cross-host compatibility. Whether that decision was made earlier and not made public, or whether Cycling really did wait until May 2009 to decide what to do, this meant that a big transition for its developer base became an awkward one.

3. Jitter editing is crippled for Max for Live users.

A major selling point of Max for Live – and a significant edge it has over solutions like SynthMaker in FL Studio or the open developer tools in Reaper – is its support for video and 3D. However, this support is crippled in Max for Live if you don’t own a separate Max/MSP/Jitter license, apparently for the sole reason of encouraging you to buy Max, too. Cycling ‘74 announced only this month that Jitter’s output window will be disabled while you’re editing patches. I thought perhaps this was for technical reasons, but in fact, if you buy a Max/MSP/Jitter license, this goes away.

The good news is, Jitter output works when you’re not editing the patch, so you can still make pretty amazing audiovisual performance solutions in Max for Live for people who don’t own Jitter but do own Max for Live. However, it seems to me unfortunate that software would be crippled for marketing reasons in this way.

4. Max isn’t open-source, and projects that use it should not be considered free software.

I’m not an ideologue, and neither are most of our readers. I rely on proprietary software on a daily basis, and I believe many of these tools are worth using. Different business models and development models may make sense for different projects.

It’s also clear that many things about Max 5’s development environment are unique, and have no direct alternative or equivalent. It’s a terrific tool, and for all the complaints about price, many users get more than their money’s worth. You make an investment in something because you think it’ll pay off.

Free and open source software has its own, unique payoff, however. You can write custom objects for Max, but you can’t modify ones that are already there. There’s no direct community involvement in the direction Max development takes. You can release a Max patch with an open-source license, but only your patch is free software; the creation tool is not. That’s not to discourage anyone from developing in Max. But if your aim is making free software, you should consider using free software as your development tools. That’s true not only of Max, but proprietary software like Apple’s Quartz Composer and Cocoa APIs, or Microsoft’s .NET. Having free software development communities using largely proprietary tools would limit the potential for these communities.

Many users are likely to use both something like Max and something like Pd or Processing; that’s healthy. But just as Cycling and Ableton have worked to build their business model, the larger music tech community will benefit if people contribute to and use the open source/free software model, as well.

You don’t need to engage in philosophical arguments because of the practical reasons for doing so. One practical reason these alternatives are important:

5. Open-source alternatives are the choice you need if you care about mobile hardware.

Ableton and Cycling ‘74 software run only on desktop Mac and Windows. Without touching the question of whether desktop Linux makes sense, open source software clearly has the edge on new, emerging, embedded, and mobile platforms. Part of being truly free software is the ability to compile that software anywhere, any time. On the Linux side, that includes platforms like Google’s Android or the upcoming Chrome OS, already running on mobile phones and e-readers, and soon on other devices. But this isn’t just about Linux or free software. Pd and ChucK, among others, already work on the iPhone, and have enabled commercial applications like RjDj and Smule, mobile apps that sell numerous copies and are featured in the windows of Apple Stores around the world. You could see a Max 5 run-time for iPhone, but it’s impossible for commercial development to keep pace with everything out there.

Conclusion: choose wisely. It’d be easy for me to come out, guns blazing, advocating free software development, or alternatively, make CDM the all-Max-for-Live-all-the-time channel and ignore other options. Obviously, neither of those makes sense. I hope that Cycling and Ableton will address some of these areas going forward. I hope that we’ll do as good a job as possible on CDM covering Max for Live and how to use it. I likewise hope that we’ll work hard to develop the free software community, too. Open source doesn’t have to mean unfriendly – have a look at Processing, which I’ve found easier to teach and easier to use in my own work than commercial software. This is really about understanding the underlying models behind these tools, making the best use of those models, and making the best use of the tools for the job.

For anyone whose complaint about OSC aka OpenSoundControl is that it lacks broad hardware support, I have one word for you:

Unicorns.

OSC now runs on magical unicorns. (Would a unicorn not want high-resolution, human-readable messages encoded with time-stamps? I think they would. And because OSC is transport-independent, it can absolutely run on magical Unicorn Beams.)

No idea what this post is about? Don’t worry — I’ll have a talking unicorn narrate a proper, sophisticated, complete introduction to OSC for beginners soon. They’re magical, so they can make complex topics lucid to any audience.

Yesterday, I wrote, entirely tongue in cheek and not expecting anything to actually come of it:

I think maybe I’ll start running screaming headlines with things I want in them, if only for good luck. Tomorrow on CDM: “You Know What Annoys Me? The Fact That We Don’t Have Unicorns. Magic Unicorns. Who Speak OSC.”

Today, via Twitter, Max patcher and audiovisual Merlock Andrew Lovett-Barron of Toronto wrote to me:

@peterkirn I made you a unicorn that speaks OSC.

And here it is, for your enjoyment, in Max 5 patch format:

http://andrewlb.com/max/Oscicorn_for_CDM.maxpat

This is, of course, very silly. But it’s an excuse to pitch Andrew’s site, which has lots of patching and coding goodies and visual creations:

http://andrewlb.com/

And perhaps more importantly, OSC now has a mascot. That means t-shirts, plushies, costumes, the lot. Your job: what should the name of this unicorn be?

All MIDI has is an antiquated DIN cable. Oh, yeah, that and millions of compatible devices. We hope OSC support won’t be as rare as unicorns.

Side note: please don’t troll this post, tempting as that may be. It’ll make the unicorn cry.

Design in music in a digital world can be about the object as the sound – musical ideas translate from one medium to many others. And just when you think you’ve seen it all, someone comes up with a new visual metaphor, a new creation for manipulating music.

OTTO is a functioning prototype combining interactive hardware and computer software, the invention of Luca De Rosso. He produced the design as a thesis project for his masters’ degree in Visual and Multimedia Communications at IUAV University of Venice. It uses the Arduino open source hardware platform and Cycling ’74′s Max/MSP software, and Luca accordingly is quick to credit the assistance of those two communities. In that sense, two, I think it points to lots of new design in the field of integrated hardware and software – not just standalone hardware or standalone software or generic controllers for anything, but hardware that itself behaves like software.

All photos here courtesy Luca and used by permission; see his Flickr account.

OTTO ~ demo.01 from Luca De Rosso on Vimeo.

Luca sends along some more details of the behind-the-scenes workings just for us. (Thanks, mate!)

Luca actually had assistance from his father working on the case. (I love that – father-son collaboration!) All the electronics are on a single Arduino board, and the patch works in Max. (Max has features that make it well worth using, but it’d be nice to see a Pd port, too, making the whole setup open source – and giving you an easy way to run it on Linux.)

OTTO ~ Getting Started from Luca De Rosso on Vimeo.

Luca sends us a view of the innards of this device – you saw it here first:

The first prototype is done, says Luca, with three more coming in coming days as he heads to a festival in Croatia. Plans for the future: no commercial availability yet, but Luca says he’d be happy to hear from anyone interested in manufacturing. (Capital remains the big challenge, even as fabrication gets easier.)

I also love the way he’s designed the documentation. Music tech industry, please, this is how it should be done – with all due respect and without naming names, we really would love if you just showed us your gear and didn’t have some swarmy dude gushing about lots of hype. In fact, we’d be equally happy to buy your gear if the design spoke for itself rather than having your name and circuit diagrams and random text plastered all over it.

But this is really visually inspiring, creative work. And to top it off, it looks insanely fun to play. Putting the beats in a circle opens up all kinds of other possibilities, and suggests thinking in terms of cycles rather than the grids we see on other hardware. As with the monome, you can imagine other software applications that would hook into this basic, minimal hardware design. I hope we see more of this design and concept.

http://www.lucaderosso.com/otto/otto

More videos:

OTTO ~ demo.02 from Luca De Rosso on Vimeo.

OTTO ~ demo.03 from Luca De Rosso on Vimeo.

If you haven’t been following Max 5 updates, the folks at Cycling ’74 have been aggressively bug squashing. The changelog for 5.0.6 alone is exhaustive. (Via @rekkerd on Twitter, of rekkerd.org.)

Updated: Also new in Max 5, it’s now possible as of 5.0.6 to properly save your patches to a version control repository. Don’t know what that is? Now’s a perfect time to find out — it means it’ll be easier to track changes you make to your own patches, and easier to collaborate with other people. And it’s free. From adamj, on comments:

RE: the diff’ing issue I was talking about above. Timothy Place (one of the Max developers) shared this helpful tidbit:

“Since the change log is a mile long, I’ll point out an obscure new power-user feature in Max 5.0.6.

You can send a new message to Max like this (or put it in an init file):
;max sortpatcherdictonsave 1

This makes it so that the JSON files that are use by Max for saving patches will keep the dictionary in the same order (alphabetized) every time you save. If you are keeping your patches in version control (e.g. SVN, GIT, CVS, etc.) then this should make your diffs a lot more usable.”

See: Version Control and Sharing for Patching: Keep Those Max, Pd Patches in Order with Git

And in other Max news, Expo74 will be a full-blown Max conference in April in San Francisco. You still have a few days to lock in the US$295 intro price (through 3/1). On the menu:

• C74-taught workshops for users: live looping, 3D, Max for Live, new timing objects, etc.
• Workshops for developers: C programming and the Max external API
• Special guest speakers, including Robert Henke — but also Miller Puckette, the creator of the original Max and developer of Cycling ’74′s open-source rival Pd.
• An afternoon on teaching Max
• A “Science Fair” for sharing projects
• Field trips
• A “Relationship Manager” – a sort of conference concierge – plus access to the C74 folks, a bit like the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference

Expo74

It’s good stuff. And the price seems a very reasonable deal for a conference.

You know, it also reminds me that some of the events around the open-source tools could be friendlier than they are. And we like science fairs. I’m not sure that I’ll be able to make it out to California in April (I’ll be there in March for the Game Developer Conference), but eager to hear how this goes.

But speaking of open source, don’t want to spend April at an event for a proprietary tool? Prefer the East Coast to the West Coast? Like code better than patching? Like tools that begin with the letter “S” better than the letter “M”? Want tools that make you think of supermassive black holes? Oh, April in North America has you covered regardless of what you like. One moment while I write up another post…

Ready for some musical genetic engineering?

Much of the sound of electronic music today grows out of the use – and abuse – of specific designs. The electronica beats bred in discos and techno, Detroit and Berlin have a direct lineage to analog step sequencers and the rigid precision of Roland’s early electronic devices. These designs create limitations to embrace and to oppose – just as music notation or theoretical convention did for composers for centuries.

Okay, that’s a lofty way to put it — the question here is, how do you re-engineer music, even an ounce at a time? If you’re a composer a few centuries ago, you make subtle changes to your craft, working inside a convention, and write that down. (Just as with electronic music, there is a layer of separation – only then, it was a piece of paper.) If you’re an electronic artist today, you can likewise change what you’re able to control, and how, playing live. The differences at first may be imperceptible, but just like learning an instrument, the long-term payoff can be huge.

I asked for examples of what people are doing with the Lemur multi-touch touchscreen controller and its recently updated V2 software. This isn’t just about the Lemur – it illustrates what’s possible when the musical device and the controller can flow freely out of a musician’s imagination. That could apply to hardware or software designs well beyond the Lemur.

Mikael Björk of Sweden responded with a terrific example, a “dynamic” sequencer available to all Lemur users via JazzMutant. The open-ended screen layout of the Lemur has allowed the creator to provide all kinds of unusual control over morphing beats, with your fingertips manipulating simulated physics as beats twist around you. It’s not just electronica and sampling and DJing, either – he also has an incredible clip working with a very talented vocalist. It sounds markedly different from the more conventional, Loopstation-style loop performance.

DyNAmic is a sophisticated step sequencer managed by a Max patch, and tightly connected to a Live rack. The Live rack consisting of two Simpler devices containing basic sine waves for low and high percussions, a Simpler containing noise for your hi-hats, and one containing a square wave for your bass sounds. In addition, each Simpler feeds an Autofilter and Redux for effects modulation, all of this being controlled from your Lemur of course.

Template created by Mikaël Björk aka Lo-Fi Massahkah.
http://www.lofimassahkah.net

What he says in a separate post on his blog sums up a lot of what I have to say about sequencers and samplers, too:

Sequencing. Sequencing. Sequencing.

You’d think that that’s all I’m about. Perhaps. Sequencers are fun when you can’t really play an instrument. They might also be fun if you CAN play an instrument. I like my new sequencer – and I hope you’ll like it too.

See: Hip to be Square

The upcoming release of Max for Live should mean that Live can work more seamlessly with the Lemur and the control configuration — more on that soon. But this doesn’t have to even be about Live; I imagine we’ll see other setups moving this direction, too.

And having an open music controller means that, pricey as the Lemur is, you get added value from this kind of artist contribution. (See also: monome, on CDM or the monome project site.) You can use this sequencer layout as is — use it in a different way musically — or modify it, or create your own. The whole patch and extensive how-tos are right on JazzMutant’s site:

JazzMutant Workshop: DyNAmic

So, cool as that is, I’m sure many of you were expecting the glitchy beat modulations that result. Here’s a related project that moves in a very different direction.

Schack & Wetterberg Live looping from Lo-Fi Massahkah on Vimeo.

Esben Schack and Andreas Wetterberg doing a set on Café Zusammen in Copenhagen. Esben on vocals and guitar, Andreas on Live (looping) and Lemur.

And for more of this stuff, you can follow the Vimeo feed:
http://www.vimeo.com/user454089

Not much to add – when the tech is working right, your traditional musicianship (if you’re lucky enough to have it) can come out. And while the occasional touchscreen tap may not seem as dynamic by comparison, I think the way to think of the Lemur is as a compositional device – the vocalist is the real “player,” in a conventional sense, whereas the Lemur is acting as a composer — remixer, however you want to think of it — in real-time.

My respect for the Lemur has really grown as it has matured; the folks at JazzMutant have addressed some of my design complaints. Its cost is, like most boutique instruments that aren’t made in huge quantities, a premium – no argument there. Likewise, you can sacrifice some of that unique design and get a cheap commodity device. In the end, I think there’s a value in both. To me, the more important thing is what people are doing musically. So I’ll be sure to follow both – and hopefully share some how-to people for our Lemur owners and DIY touchscreen users (or other controllers) alike. Even if you just have a box with a few knobs on it, it is possible to move in some new directions.

Got more examples? We’d love to see them.

We get the “where do I go to learn this stuff” question a lot in the inbox. With Max for Live coming later this year, bringing the powers of Max to Ableton Live, I imagine the hunger for knowledge on that tool will be all the greater. (At the same time, I think the growing popularity of DIY tools means that it won’t make alternative tools like SuperCollider, Pd, Csound and the like less popular — I think we’ll see a growing trend toward all of these tools, provided we can show folks how to use them and get better at them ourselves!)

I know one route that has been successful for many people is the coursework at Harvestworks, the storied research and study center in New York. I can heartily endorse this one and say that, while I know and am friends with all the faculty, I have absolutely no investment in this. Dafna Naphtali, Hans Tammen, and Zach Seldess will all be teaching week-long intensives at Harvestworks in Manhattan. They’re not cheap – $1275 for the whole week – but I know some people have even flown to New York from other parts of the world to study up.

And what does all this mean? Well, it means you can turn Street Fighter, the game, into an improvisational ballet as instructor Zachary Seldess has done (above). Among other things, of course.

If it’s all out of your budget, don’t worry; we’ll have some other learning resources for you soon. But for those of you who can take the plunge, here are some details:

(apologies for copy-and-paste, which I always smugly say I don’t do, but I’m in a rush)

HARVESTWORKS DIGITAL MEDIA ARTS CENTER, NEW YORK

—–> MAX/MSP/JITTER FULL WEEK INTENSIVE COURSE

Dafna Naphtali / Zachary Seldess / Hans Tammen
Mondays through Fridays 10am to 6pm
Section A: March 23 through 27
Section B: August 31 through September 4

Cost: $1275 (incl. Harvestworks Membership)

Location: Harvestworks (http://www.harvestworks.org)
596 Broadway #602
New York City, NY 10012 (at Houston St)
Subway: F/V Broadway/Lafayette, 6 Bleecker, W/R Prince

From its central SoHo location in New York City, Harvestworks brings together innovative practitioners from all branches of the digital arts, and provides a vital context and catalyst for creativity in the field. For the last thirty years we have offered artists on-site recording studios, programming services, workshops, classes and one-on-one tutorials in emerging technologies supporting the pioneers of computer music with equipment and instruction. As a tool for artists, Max has been a central part of the Harvestworks program for almost 20 years. We offer regularly scheduled year-round classes and workshops on a wide variety of topics relating to Max/MSP and Jitter; as well as our Certificate Program, a flexible course of one-on-one instruction.

Now, Harvestworks is offering a full-week, 40hr crash course in the basics of Max/MSP and Jitter, run by veteran Max programmer Dafna Naphtali, Harvestworks engineer and teacher Zachary Seldess, and Harvestworks’ Deputy Director Hans Tammen. The course is designed for beginners who want to get a head start with this software package. The course may be especially appealing to artists living outside of New York City who don’t have the opportunity to learn Max in their own hometown and who would enjoy a week in New York City.

The cost of the course is $1200, plus $75 for the annual Harvestworks membership that is required to take the course. The courses are Mondays through Fridays 10am to 6pm. Working in our computer lab after 6pm can also be arranged. Lecture demonstrations will alternate with practice time, and some of our Max-savvy interns can be available to assist during practice time. Workstations with Max/MSP/Jitter will be available, but it is also recommended that you bring your own laptop. The course will provide lots of practice and sample patches. Students enrolled in Max/MSP/Jitter related classes at Harvestworks are eligible for Cycling 74′s educational discount when purchasing the software. The course is limited to 10 students.

We will not provide meals or snacks for the course, but can point to lots of cheap dining places in the neighborhood. We also cannot provide accommodations, but can help with posting requests or bringing you in contact with other artists who might be able to help.

To sign up for the course, or if you have further questions, please call Hans Tammen at 212-431-1130 ext 13, or go to our webstore at

http://www.harvestworks.org/cms/index.php/Classes/Classes-new.html

In his interview on Cycling74′s website, Hans Tammen gives a few insights into Max teaching at Harvestworks: http://www.cycling74.com/story/2008/9/15/113650/347

MAX CRASH COURSE OUTLINE:

Day 1 – The Basics: Objects vs. messages vs. comments; ordering of operations; math in Max; scaling and mapping ranges of numbers; playing sound files.
Day 2 – Basics of modular programming; live audio input; recording sound files; simple data storage.
Day 3 – Controlled chaos; useful GUI objects; more data storage; basics of synthesis.
Day 4: Interfacing with the outside world. Overview of MIDI, the HI object (game controllers), Wii controller, the Harvestworks Sensor Station, using a Wacom tablet. Wireless Miditron. Data storage.
Day 5: Introduction to Jitter: Jitter matrix; basic matrix processing; playing and basic manipulation of QuickTime movies; basics of Open GL.

INSTRUCTOR BIOS:

DAFNA NAPHTALI has been a Max teacher and programmer at Harvestworks since 1995. She earned a degree in Music Technology at NYU. She was Chief Engineer of the NYU Music Technology Studios until 1998, and has taught Max there as an adjunct instructor since 1996. Naphtali is also an academic advisor for both undergraduate and graduate students in NYU’s Music Technology program. She was a programmer for two years for many artists and her own projects at multi-channel sound gallery Engine 27. As a composer, writing custom Max/MSP programs since 1992 has enabled her to perform and compose using her laptop-based noise/audio processing “instrument” to alter the sound of her singing, vocalisms, personalized recordings as well as the sound of any musician playing with her. She has received commissions and awards from New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Meet the Composer, Experimental TV Center, American Composers Forum, Brecht Forum, and has held residencies at STEIM (Holland), Music OMI and iEAR at Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute. http://www.dafna.info

ZACHARY SELDESS currently works at Harvestworks as a resident Programmer/Teacher, and at Brooklyn College CUNY as adjunct faculty. He also works at The CUNY Graduate Center’s New media Lab creating interactive virtual sound environments in 3D Game Space using the Torque Game Engine and Max/MSP. He is currently pursuing a PhD in composition at The Graduate Center CUNY where his primary teachers are Amnon Wolman and Morton Subotnick. Previously he worked as a performer, composer, private teacher and adjunct professor at Wilbur Wright College and Harold Washington College in Chicago. As a composer, Zachary has collaborated with artists in many mediums including theater, dance, film, and poetry. He spends much of his time these days creating interactive media artwork, particularly within the Max/MSP/Jitter programming environment. Programming projects include work with Jane Rigler on Manhattan New Music Project’s “Music Cre8tor”, a sensor/software music-creating interface for developmentally challenged children.
http://www.zacharyseldess.com/

HANS TAMMEN is currently Deputy Director at Harvestworks, and is responsible for the oversight of all projects related to Max/MSP/Jitter and Physical Computing, as well as managing the education program and the studios. In this position he encounters the projects of approx. 250 clients, students and Artist In Residence per year. After an initial degree in Adult Education in 1988 he taught as an adjunct at Kassel University, and as part of his works as a union technology consultant from 1992 to 2000 he held about 120 one to five-day seminars using modern seminar techniques like metaplan, role-plays, and others. As a composer/guitarist he is best known for his “Endangered Guitar” works, interfacing his guitar with Max/MSP. Signal To Noise called his works “…a killer tour de force of post-everything guitar damage”, All Music Guide recommended him: “…clearly one of the best experimental guitarists to come forward during the 1990s.” http://www.tammen.org.

Well, this is the first time I can remember this happening. Tuesday, I covered a GBP20 Max object for independent tempo and pitch modification in Max 5:
elastic~: Pitch, Speed Control Module for Your Max 5 Patch

I wasn’t personally so blown away by it, but it looked interesting, and it uses algorithms used in a number of commercial projects. But Max guru Devin Kerr put his money where his mouth was — or is that, no money where his … um … ears are — and released a free version. Unlike elastic~, it uses all included Max objects. Aside from saving you some dough, that has the significant advantage of being able to easily share patches based on his patch with fellow Max users.

Devin writes:

So I took 15 minutes and made a simple patch and video demonstrating what I’m calling “Free_Elastic”. This Max patch uses high-quality, FFT pitch shifting and is based on the standard groove~ object. It allows for much more control and customization (fft size, overlap, etc.) than “elastic~” does, and it’s FREE!

Free_Elastic: Independent Pitch/Speed Control in Max [Devin Kerr's blog]

Even if you like elastic~, you can’t really argue with the nice work Devin did on his patch. Hope this leads to some other great patching work. Now, can we get a Pd (Pure Data) port for a truly free experience, anyone?

More Goodies

Andreas Wetterberg (of Covert Operators) points to Mattijs Kneppers’ wonderful work. Object-oriented patching? Check. An MPC-inspired drum sampler? You got it.

And most notably in this context:

Real-time, natural sounding granular time stretcher / pitch shifter, version 009, patches only. Download test sounds here.

Time stretching and pitch shifting without artifacts (Max 5 only).

This patch uses the pitch~ object by CNMAT, that you can download here:
http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/downloads.

Granular time stretching has the advantage over a spectrum-based (phase vocoder) approach that it has no inherent latency. This patch aims for the same sound quality (absence of artifacts) as the time stretching features of mainstream applications such as Ableton Live or Reaktor.

That said, actually, you might enjoy those artifacts. But if you’re a Max user (or Pd user willing to do a little bit of porting), this should more than satisfy your appetite for warping. And, Andreas, I’m with you … I prefer the granular stretching sound. (Because it’s really a grain sampler and not just a delay, you may also want to check out the terrific video tutorial Peter Dines did in Reaktor. And there’s a lot more of this stuff elsewhere, as well.)

Monome Life, indeed. What makes the Monome so wonderful is not so much that the hardware and software itself are open source — nice as that may be — but that they have become a platform for experimentation and personalization. Max/MSP, now freshly injected with life following its version-5 release, has a similar ethos. Here are a couple of the creations that have impressed me most recently: a hacked-together implementation of The Game of Life in Max and Monome, and an impressive DJ app, dj64.

This is Your Life

Bean (blog | twitter | flickr) clearly very much loves his Monome, as indicated by the slideshow above. I recently spotted an interesting creation on the CDMusic Flickr Pool — an implementation of the iconic Game of Life simulation/game — and asked him about it.

I made it mainly just because I figured it should be possible. It’s not terribly efficient, and occasionally stutters, but that feels like part of its charm. It is monome tailored, but would run stand-alone with a little tweaking.

I’ve got the cleaned up version posted on my page of monome-specific patches:

http://www.fourthirtyeight.com/monome/#maxlife

There are a number of downloads there, including that one, so Max users, have at them!

Having taught Max to college students and hung around Max and Pd patchers, I actually think I enjoy the hacked-together stuff more. It’s software, but somehow the visible evidence left behind makes it clear that these tools have been touched by human hands. Here’s a look at the interface and the resulting patch in action (prior to clean-up, I might add), with Bean’s caveat that “Max is in no way the ideal, or even a particularly suitable, environment for implementing a Game of Life app. I did it basically just to see if I could do it. And the answer is, yes, yes I could.”

dj64: DJ Software, Monome Style

Bitbasic has reproduced the fundamentals of a DJ setup in Max/MSP, which you can use either standalone or (ideally) controller with a Monome. Consistent with the Monome aesthetic, the emphasis is on minimalism — this isn’t quite Native Instruments Traktor, but then, that seems like part of the point. And by being incomplete, it invites users to try hacking together their own solutions and modifications.

dj64 for Monome – by Bitbasic from simon on Vimeo.

It’s really with the controller that it starts to make sense. Before DJs out there start knocking this, I think it’s the fact that this is the opposite of a turntable that makes it interesting. The results are digital and glitchy. The interface is buttons instead of the continuous control offered by a physical turntable. The software interface may look like a typical 2-deck DJ rig, but the results are unmistakably Monome-y.

Features, as implemented in the Max software and Monome control:

• Pitch and pitch bend, time stretch controls
• Crossfader, 2-channel mixing
• Cue set and return
• Effects: flanger, ring mod, stutter, granular, more

bitbasic.co.uk
dj64 Project @ monome docs
dj64 discussion @ monome forums

It’s under development, so stay tuned. But as a first go, I already find it inspiring. Seen other Monome applications you like? Creating something of your own — even hack-y and unfinished? Holler out in comments.