You’re not, in fact, a lonely bedroom musician with no friends. You’ve got friends. You’ve got collaborators. You’ve got audio and visual artists who want to play with your laptop with sync piped between you, and yet wireless synchronization for laptop performance has often been an elusive ideal. Here, in spectacular fashion, you can see it all come together over WiFi with Ableton Live, a projection-mapped coffeemaker, and everything from percolation sounds to the keypad sound effect from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

This just in from Barcelona – a new Max for Live plug-in is making laptops and coffee pots jam in harmony. A proper review is in order from CDM. (Well, once we find a few friends… by astounding coincidence, I’ll be surrounded by Ableton users – visual and audio – next week in Rome. I’ll make it happen.) But that’s no reason to deny you the pleasure of the video now. It’s the best part of waking up.

More: http://www.ooeevv.com/

Some of you are probably already sitting on top of a Max for Live license for your copy of Ableton Live. It’s there, just waiting to do … something. Maybe you’ve loaded one of the many extraordinary patches out there – good move. But as for building your own patches, you may easily have become overwhelmed by choice. Max is a blank slate, and a blank slate that can do everything can make it hard to start with anything.

It’s easy to overlook simple first steps. Max was originally built just to do simple math on messages, before it even had audio capabilities. So that means simple message processing is a great place to start. The Ableton Cookbook’s Anthony Arroyo introduces Max for Live in just that fashion, by starting you out building an arpeggiator. No fancy granular audio processing, no mind-bending processing of the event engine in Live – just some simple, old-fashioned arithmetic. You’ll learn MIDI in, MIDI out, monitoring what’s going on, basic math, and sliders. You can always go deeper after that.

This is the first of more videos to come, all promising to focus on simple devices; I’m curious to see where they go.

Not quite your speed? Here are two more intro tutorials – and one advanced tutorial – to get you going.

Ready to get a little advanced? It’s an older video, but still relevant to new versions of Live – don’t let the date stop you. Here, a serious Max for Live guru goes deep into spectral mixing. It’s not at all the simple, step-by-step approach I’ve just endorsed, but … hey, you’re still with me, and this is fun. Description:

In this video new addition to the Dubspot team Dave Linnenbank, creator of Puremagnetik’s Max Fuel collection of patches for Ableton and Cycling 74′s Max For Live walks us through his Spectral Mixer patch. It allows you to adjust the volume of the loud, medium and quiet parts of a sound and create some very interesting sounds.

Blog post and downloads: Max for Live Tutorial :: ‘Spectral Mixer’ [Dubspot Blog]

If you’re looking to build your own instruments and effects and sequencers and play with patching, you really don’t want this software. No, seriously – while a fascinating, fun tech demo, something like the desktop Pd or Max is probably what you want. (As we saw earlier this week, Pd-extended just got much easier to use, and it’s free.) This makes sound, but it’s also buggy and in progress and likely more of interest to coders.

Okay, now having scared off some people, let’s talk nerd-to-nerd for a second. Patchosaur, an open-source, GitHub-hosted project by BADAMSON, is nonetheless seriously cool, demonstrating not only what’s possible in a browser but what Webby technologies can do for creative music-making. Powered by network-centric node.js, it does do a lot of things Pd and Max do. And it demonstrates why some of us in the Pd community are wondering if Web-style front-ends could be the future of user interfaces.

If none of that previous paragraph made any sense to you, let’s put it another way:

The stuff in your browser will continue to make all the software you use better. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.

You might be running software in a browser. You might not. You might get to the point where you don’t really care. But as what makes a computer a computer still remains more or less the same, your computer can continue to improve, free. And that’s pretty great.

If that sounds interesting, music nerdsters, then check out the guts of Patchosaur:
http://patchosaur.org/

Thanks to Brendan Adamson for sending in this project. I just hope I’ve inadvertently derailed – slash – inspired someone’s end-of-the-semester coding project. Let us know.

“Timelapse” usually refers to the process of sampling small bits of video or film and piecing them together to form a sped-up version of reality. (Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. Any recording involves sampling small bits of time. Timelapse simply plays back those samples at a rate faster than reality, so that instead of playing back film frames recorded at 30 frames per second at a playback speed of 30 frames per second, you play back film recorded at one frame every ten minutes at 30 frames per second, for example.)

What if you made a timelapse of sound, and not simply image? Reader Andrew Spitz did that, building a sound-sampling app in visual development tool Max/MSP. He’s made the resulting tool available to anyone using Mac or Windows, for free, so you can try it yourself. In the demo video, what you get is a stuttering, rhythmic montage of found sound. But change the material or setting, and perhaps you can get very different results.

I love the word he’s using here: “phonography.”

phonoLapse is a free desktop app for Mac and Windows that lets you create audio time-lapses. For the 2010 Enterferenze New Art Festival I put together a little Time Lapse Phonography piece that followed me over the course of 24 hours (check the video below). I have been receiving emails from people wanting to create their own, and decided to work on a standalone version so you too can create some time-lapse phonography .

Grab it yourself:
phonoLapse {+ software} [sound+design]

By the way, Andrew is responsible for one of my other favorite recent projects:
Voice Messages Become 3D Paper Waveform Sculptures: Paper Note

When we last caught up with the touch-less, gestural music-making of composer Chris Vik, the Australian musician was sharing his own Kinectar software and playing both dubstep and ambient scores for modern dance. Now, Vik is back playing a very substantial physical instrument: Melbourne’s four story-tall, MIDI-retrofitted Town Hall Organ. Here, the Max-powered software takes on some very big sound from some very big pipes.

He writes:

I’ve created my own software Kinectar, which allows the use of the Kinect to control MIDI devices, ie. playing notes through simple gestures and motion. The Melbourne Town Hall Organ got a referb in the late 90s adding the ability of MIDI messages to active the notes… this happened.

Controlling a 4-story pipe organ with the Kinect

Previously: From Beautiful Ambient Modern Dance to Dubstep, Gestures to Music in Kinect (Download the Tool)

What if your musical instrument were gelatinous? Edible?

“Noisy Jelly” is the latest project to imagine that scenario. Thanks to the capacitive quality of gelatin (known to us Americans by the brand name JELL-O and to some simply as “jelly”), you can mix up a set of colored instruments that jiggle when you touch them. Powered by the open hardware platform Arduino to read sensors and Max/MSP to produce sound, it’s the work of a couple of Paris-based students, Raphaël and Marianne Cauvard.

Check out the terrific video featuring wide-eyed children, and specs below.

What makes this more delightful is the possibility that we’ll see orchestras of squishy, organic, edible instruments. NYC Resistor and our friend Ranjit Bhatnagar built their own instrument out of JELL-O (or fruit salad, depending on the iteration). The Gel-tone made a splash (erm, squish) as a more whimsical entry at the Guthman Musical Instrument competition, and was played and eaten at our own Handmade Lounge at Solid Sound Festival in Massachusetts last summer. Hilariously, it debuted at (and was invented for) a JELL-O mold competition. See these couple of videos (Guthman top; Solid Sound bottom) below, and find more information on that instrument:

the resistor jeltone :: an edible toy piano [openMaterials]

How to make your own: The Resistor JelTone (I dearly hope this inspires more copy-cats. Let the gelatinous musical instrument revolution continue!)

More on the Noisy Jelly project:

Note : This project is a fully working prototype made with Arduino and Max/MSP, there are absolut no sound editing in the video…
More picture at this Flickr set
And download the project PDF
Noisy jelly is a game where the player has to cook and shape his own musical material, based on coloured jelly.
With this noisy chemistry lab, the gamer will create his own jelly with water and a few grams of agar agar powder. After added different color, the mix is then pour in the molds. 10 min later, the jelly shape can then be placed on the game board,and by touching the shape, the gamer will activate different sounds.
Technically, the game board is a capacitive sensor, and the variations of the shape and their salt concentration, the distance and the strength of the finger contact are detected and transform into an audio signal.
This object aims to demonstrate that electronic can have a new aesthetic, and be envisaged as a malleable material, which has to be manipulated and experimented.
Author: Raphaël pluvinage (pluvinage.eu and twitter (twitter.com/#!/rpluvina)
& Marianne Cauvard (mariannecauvard.fr)
at L’Ensci Les ateliers (ensci.com)

If you do make your own project, we’d love to see it. Perhaps a gel-orchestra is next.

Several people showed this to me; notably at DE:BUG (Deutsch)
http://de-bug.de/musiktechnik/archives/5820.html

It started as some compelling demos or proof of concept, but it’s plenty real now: the tools for translating movement, gesture, and dance from the body to interactive music march forward. Empowered by Microsoft’s Kinect and an artist-friendly toolchain, even a single, clever developer can do a lot. Sound designer, music producer, and Max/MSP developer Chris Vik of Melbourne has been one of those busy early pioneers, with an incredible tool called Kinectar.

So, the tech is cool and shiny and impressive: what about the actual music? And, even more importantly, what if all the hand waving and moving about could be meaningful? That’s the next step. For his part, Chris is teaming up with a dancer and choreographer to combine his compositional ideas with someone who knows how to move. The Dubstep-y demos (all below) are impressive, true, but the early tests of the work with the choreographer are simply beautiful, and demonstrate that wobble bass isn’t the limit of what this can do. They also turn the arbitrary arm-waggling into a part of the art.

And as for you: the software’s alpha, but you can fire up your copy of software like Ableton Live and grab this software for Mac or Windows and try it yourself. So if you don’t like the results – be the gesture-controlled basslines too wobbly, be they not wobbly enough – you can put your music, and your movement, where your mouth is.

At top, Chris shows off an early test of the dance collab. (There’s more to come.) Below, a tutorial that shows how this works with Ableton. And read on for more from Chris on what the work with the dancer is about, and what the tool can do.

Chris writes:

Since April 2011 I’ve been working solidly with the Microsoft Kinect, developing my software, Kinectar, to enable its use as a MIDI controller for performing music live. I’ve done a number of performances around Australia since I started the project, however, it’s safe to say that, although I would consider myself an electronic musician, I’m certainly no dancer. Enter, Paul…

Dancer, Paul Walker and I have joined forces to bring the Kinect controlled music concept into the world of contemporary dance. Recently we obtained a residency at PACT theatre (centre for emerging artists), where we spent the week developing different ways of implementing my Kinect music control system in a dance context.

My system is developed in Max and uses OpenNI drivers, OSCeleton and Ableton Live.

via Chris’ blog

CDM will check back in with Chris soon, because:

I’ve got some more videos to release over the coming weeks from a range of my different Kinect music performance applications, including controlling/conducting the Melbourne Town Hall Organ and a 100+ speaker Kinect-controlled diffusion performance. I’ll keep you posted when they’re released!

More on the software:

Kinectar Performance Platform is a toolkit developed by music producer Chris Vik to allow the use of Microsoft’s Kinect motion tracking sensor in computer-based music. The software is designed for electronic musicians to expand the way they control their music in a futuristic and extremely expressive way, using only the waving of hands and a small amount of creativity. It can be used to control the simplest of parameters like a filter or LFO, play notes and chords on a sampler or synthesizer, or be programmed to control an entire live-set through nothing more than gesture.

Key Features:

Movement Tracking UI allows manipulation of the Kinect’s human tracking capabilities, displaying all relevant data extracted from the hands location in 3d-space

Instrument Builder lets the user build virtual ‘instruments’ by outputting MIDI notes in three modes:

• Static – Produces a single note value. Useful for drum triggers, turning on/off effects within a DAW or feed that trigger into Kinectar to switch between presets using your gesture
• Solo – Do sweeping solos by selecting from over 40 musical scale presets or click the notes on the UI to make your own
• Chord – Create a progression of up to 8 chords per preset to play live

Global Flags lets you turn on/off Kinectar’s instruments using a MIDI note sent from your DAW, external MIDI controller or Kinectar itself

MIDI Preset Control lets you switch between Kinectar’s presets and instruments using a single MIDI note

Value Editor enables many more MIDI/OSC outputs, for controlling device values

Visual Metronome popout window sits on top of all programs to make it easy to see if you’re in-time when the music gets messy

It’s labeled “rough alpha,” so don’t expect a finished tool here, but you can go download it and give it a try (or learn more about what’s possible):

http://kinectar.org/download

And now, the obligatory (but quite awesome, Chris) Dubstep demo videos:

If you’re a Mac user, we’ve got some cheap and free tools for you. And if you’re a Max patcher, you may be surprised with how they were built: they were all exported from Max 6.

This week, we welcome a guest writer developer Dan Nigrin. Amidst some new controversy about Apple and app distribution, here Dan looks at how Apple’s marketplace can indeed be useful to developers using Max 6, the popular graphical patching tool. (Incidentally, the libpd library could work for App Store apps, too, and for mobile on iOS and Android, along with various other tools, so developers now have lots of options for getting their ideas out there.) -PK

CDM has covered the Mac App Store and its impact (or not) on music software quite extensively in the past – see Apple’s App Store May Not Work for Audio Devs; Developers Respond, October 2010, and Six Reasons the Mac App Store Means Little for Music Creation – At Least For Now, January 2011.

But I think a new development may start to change things, at least a little bit. Cycling ‘74’s newly-released Max 6 now makes it possible for standalone apps created with it to be released on the Mac App Store. Previous versions of Max caused some standalone preference files to be written to a Preferences folder on the Mac; believe it or not, this violated an Apple Mac Store rule (an app can only write to very specific locations, not including the Preferences folder – go figure). To Cycling’s credit, they changed the preferences file location starting in Max 6, and so that obstacle has now been removed from getting Max apps in the Store.

I first asked the question about getting Max-built apps in the Mac App Store around the time Apple originally announced it in 2010 – see a thread in the Cycling ’74 forums. Soon after, Oli Larkin tested the waters, and he was the first to discover the above problem with the preference files. After Cycling addressed that, James Howard Young then tackled more minutia required to pass all the approval and validation steps Apple requires, and was the first to successfully get his app live on the store, followed soon after by Oli’s and then my two. We all shared our experience on the above thread, and with each other in private emails.

The apps have done quite well (Audio Plugin Player, below, made it up to #7 on Top Paid Apps in the Music category of the App Store within 48 hours of release), though we are all still experimenting with different price points, support models, etc. — usual App Store growing pains, I would imagine. Here are the apps currently available – note that there may be more, these are just the ones I know about:

Four Apps, Available Now

Defective Records Software (Dan Nigrin)
Audio Plugin Player
Get it on CDM Apps

A lightweight VST and AU instrument plugin host, that allows you to play these instruments using either your mouse, computer keyboard (including support for non-US keyboards), or MIDI device (both hardware and software MIDI devices supported). It has a simple, one-screen interface, without any of the complexity that a DAW takes for a newcomer to get up and running.

Defective Records Software (Dan Nigrin)
General MIDI Player
Get it on CDM Apps

An easy way to turn your Mac into an instrument, using its built-in General MIDI support. You can play these instruments using either your mouse, computer keyboard (including support for non-US keyboards), or MIDI device (both hardware and software MIDI devices supported). It has a simple, one-screen interface.

James Howard Young
TapNTempo
Get it on CDM Apps

A fully featured metronome that offers customizable sounds, real-time tempo tapping, and beat and division capabilities. TapNTempo’s easy-to-use interface includes the best of the traditional metronome, but feature bloating is avoided in favor of simplicity.

Oli Larkin
pMix
Get it on CDM Apps

pMix is a sound design, composition and performance tool that allows you to morph between VST plugin presets using an intuitive graphical interface. 

Presets are represented by coloured balls that are positioned on a 2D plane. The size of each ball and its proximity to the cursor affects the weight of the associated preset in the interpolation.

Morphing between presets often results in the discovery of interesting hybrid sounds. By constraining sound manipulations within a predesigned “interpolation space” complex transitions can be achieved that would otherwise be hard to manage.

pMix can load four VST2 audio plugins. It comes with a suite of specially designed plugins which cover a range of experimental DSP techniques (noise generators, FM synthesis, formant filtering, frequency shifting etc). These plugins can also be used in other VST host applications.

Conclusions, Looking Forward

I made a decision to “start simple” with my App Store apps, compared to for example my Klee or Cyclic. But as you can see, you’re not limited to just simple apps – Oli’s, for instance, is obviously quite complex. So I think that this is just the beginning of what I expect will be many Max apps on the App Store – it makes it possible for the many, many interesting projects developed in Max to reach a much bigger audience that possible before. Just taking a look at the Projects page on the Cycling web site gives a sample of what soon might find its way there.

Perhaps even more exciting is news from Damon Holzborn and Brad Garton of Columbia University, that they are working on a path from Max to iOS apps, and in a way that makes them totally compliant with the iTunes App Store. Really looking forward to this!

We’re looking forward to this, too, so we’ve assembled a special section that shows apps built with Max available on the Mac App Store. We may soon follow this with other tools (Pd, Csound, etc.) if there’s demand. But here are those Max options:

Made with Max, Featured on CDM Apps

Can You Play in the Sandbox?

Ed.: One issue to watch as Apple’s brave, new App Store moves forward is sandboxing requirements. For these Max apps, it shouldn’t necessarily be a problem, but before it appears that we’re endorsing the App Store for all music apps, regardless of purpose, we’re not. A number of Apple developers have raised some concerns about sandboxing and how it’s implemented. They’re worth reading if you’re a developer – and may, in turn, inspire some tweaks from Apple in terms of how this is done. All via Daring Fireball:

Sandboxing and xScope 3.0 [furbo.org]
Fix The Sandbox [Red Sweater]
Sandboxing and Clipstart [Manton Reece]

Here are Dan’s own thoughts on the subject:

No, I’m not concerned about plugin hosting with respect to sandboxing; the sandboxing rules stipulate that you’re allowed to access files on the host system if the user specifies the file in which they are interested via a file dialog. So, in my Audio Plugin Player app, for example, that’s what I do – the user is prompted to pick the plugin they want to use via file dialog (or they can drag and drop it onto the app). That way, I am not breaking any sandbox rules.

Also, one can request additional “entitlements” for one’s application, which allow it to access locations that are not currently “approved” areas within the file system for the app to access. I’d be surprised if requesting an entitlement to access the Plug-Ins folder was not allowed… Ed. That would be, of course, relevant to Apple’s own Logic Pro as a host; despite predictions to the contrary, it appears third party developers should – theoretically – have access to the same entitlements as Apple’s own apps. And if that’s not enough, you can still distribute via other means, including in Mountain Lion, and in contrast to the App Store-only iOS model. -PK

It makes sense that the App Store, with its specific sales model and technical requirements, will suit some applications well and not others. Because you can choose to install apps from other sources, that leaves both users and developer free to choose based on their needs.

As Max for Live has matured, this tool for extending the functionality of Ableton Live has played host to a growing wave of brilliant custom tools – enough so that it can be hard to keep track. This month saw a few that deserve special mention. In particular, two tools help make MIDI mapping and automation recording easier in Live, and point the way for what the host itself could implement in a future update. (Live 9, we’re looking at you.) And in a very different vein, from Max for Live regular Protofuse, we see an intriguing alternative approach to sequencing.

Clip Automation does something simple: it patches a limitation in Live itself, by allowing you to record mapped automation controls directly in the Session View clips. (As the developer puts it, it grabs your “knob-twisting craziness in Session View.”) The work of Tête De Son (Jul), it’s an elegant enough solution that I hope the Abletons take note.

Clip Automation

Mapulator goes even further, re-conceiving how mapping in general works in Ableton – that is, how Live processes a change in an input (like a knob) with a change in a parameter (like a filter cutoff). Live does allow you to set minimum and maximum mappings, and reverse direction of those mappings. But the interpolation between the two is linear. Mapulator allows you to ramp in curves or even up and down again.

There’s more: you can also control multiple parameters, each at different rates. And that can be a gateway into custom devices, all implemented in control mappings. BentoSan writes:

For example, if you wanted to create a delay effect that morphs into a phaser, then cuts out and finally morphs into a reverb with an awesome freeze effect, you would be able to do this with just a single knob…

Again, this seems to me not just a clever Max for Live hack, but an illustration of how Ableton itself might work all the time, in that it’s a usable and general solution to a need many users have. Sometimes the itch Max for Live patchers scratch is an itch other people have, too.

Lots of additional detail and the full download on the excellent DJ TechTools:
Mapulator: An Advanced MIDI Mapping Tool for Ableton

Protoclidean We’ve seen Euclidean rhythms many times before, but this takes the notion of these evenly-spaced rhythmic devices to a novel sequencer. Developed by Julien Bayle, aka artist Protofuse, the Max for Live device is also a nice use of JavaScript in Max patching. See it in action in the video above. There are custom display options for added visual feedback, and whereas we’ve seen Euclidean notions in use commonly with percussion, the notion here is melodic gestures. Additional features:

• Eight channels
• Independent pitch, velocity, and offset controls
• Scale mapping
• For percussion, map to General MIDI drum maps (Eep – darn you, English, we’re using the word “map” a lot!)
• Randomization
• MIDI thru, transport sync, more…

More information:
http://designthemedia.com/theprotoclidean

Also, if you’re looking for more goodness to feed your Live rig, Ableton has added a new section to their own site called Library. You can find specific Max for Live content in that area, as well:
http://www.ableton.com/library
http://www.ableton.com/library/tags/mfl/

This is in addition to the community-hosted, community-run, not-officially-Ableton Max for Live library, which is the broadest resource online for Max for Live downloads:
http://maxforlive.com/library/

For the last few decades, generally speaking, we’ve had computers, and we’ve had physical, modular, analog gear. Computers are endlessly patchable, but not using physical cords. Modulars use physical cords, but they lack the flexibility (and affordability) of a computer.

Now, US$25 and an Arduino can change that.

rePatcher is a simple, tangible modular interface for computers. It could work with any software, but right out of the gate it already works with two popular (virtual) patching environments, Max/MSP and the free and open source Pure Data (Pd). You use physical patch cords to make connections, and those connections are reflected in the patch you see on the screen. The patch cords are coupled with requisite encoders for dialing in additional parameter changes. (Reason comes up as a possible candidate for additional compatibility, which would, of course, be really sweet.)

rePatcher is built as a shield for Arduino, so you’ll need one of those, but that still keeps the price low enough to say I absolutely have to have one of these right now.

It’s not the first attempt to do something like this, but it might be the most accessible and affordable – and interesting. And while those cute little patch cords are fun, there’s nothing stopping someone from building on this idea and going to bigger cords and something more extensive than this 6×6 matrix.

Best of all: the magic happens entirely over USB, so if you want to make this work with something else – say, your favorite VJ software – you can do so with anything that can communicate over serial.

More information:
http://www.openmusiclabs.com/projects/repatcher/