For fans of slicing, dicing, glitching, reversing, and shuffling incoming audio streams, this Max for Live Device is for you. Shuffler 2.0 is the latest in a series of “modular” Max for Live devices from developer Isotonik Studios. Mappable to MIDI, the suite of Devices focuses on simpler tasks in ways that can be combined. There are interactive Follow Actions, for instance — a feature I’ve long argued should be native to Ableton Live — plus tools for more easily mapping MIDI to envelopes. There’s a convenient Looper.

From last week, there’s a module called Smart, capable of mapping some eight macros to one knob.

The entire series is sold as a subscription for 17 quid:
http://isotonikstudios.com/modular/

Check out the Follow actions in the video below.

If you liked the generative, probability-based sequencing seen earlier this week, here’s another example – and it’s free and open source, so if you do want to pick it apart and you own a copy of Max/MSP or Max for Live, you can. Co-creator Giuseppe Sorce points us to the work:

This is a simple generative music synthesizer built in Max/MSP created by Diego Caponera, Nicolò Paternoster and Giuseppe Sorce. It involves 5 FM generators which play notes randomly based on a root key and intervals defined by the user. It’s an university project made for an exam for Sound’s Science degree ( Math Department of Roma Tor Vergata ).

The software is distributed “as is”, without any warranty, under a GPL license.

Not bad for an exam project. A heck of a lot more fun than a paper (and, believe me, I say that wholeheartedly having done a bit of university teaching).

Grab it:
http://code.google.com/p/smilesynth/

Labeled as ready for IDM or “Braindance” music, The Uncanny Sequencer could be something tasty for those tired of regular rhythms. The creation of Julien Bayle, The Uncanny Sequencer is a graphical, generative, multi-part sequencing Max for Live device built for Ableton Live. At its core, it creates polyrhythms and irregular rhythms by making the appearance of each beat probabilistic rather than determinate.

Thanks to Julien for sending this our way. (Matrixsynth and Synthtopia deserve credit for being faster.)

Features, as described by its creator:

• 8 channels (meaning 8 sequencers in one)
• from 1 to 32 steps in each channel (every number choosable)
• generates MIDI notes to any devices (inside or outside Ableton LIVE)
• based on probabilities
• unique sequences generation
• huge presets bank engine (including morphing between 2 presets)
• 10 pages documentation

€15,00, available for download.

http://designthemedia.com/products/file/13-the-uncanny-sequencer/

Max 6 in Public Beta; For Home-brewing Music Tools Graphically, Perhaps the Biggest Single Update Yet

Just because a music tool fills your screen with tools and options doesn’t necessarily make it easier to realize your ideas. From the beginning, the appeal of Max – as with other tools that let you roll your own musical tools from a set of pre-built building blocks – has been the blank canvas.

Max 6 would appear to aim to make the gap between your ideas and those tools still narrower, and to make the results more sonically-pleasing. The reveal: it could also change how you work with patches in performance and production. I was surprised when early teasers failed to impress some users, perhaps owing to scant information. Now, Max 6 is available in public beta, and the details are far clearer. Even if Max 5 was the biggest user interface overhaul in many years, Max 6 appears to be the biggest leap in actual functionality.

It’s what I’d describe as a kitchen-sink approach, adding to every aspect of the tool, so there’s almost certain to be some things here you won’t use. What could appeal to new users, though, are I think two major changes.

More visual patching feedback and discoverability. First, building upon what we saw in Max 5, Max’s approach is to provide as much visual information as possible about what you’re doing. It’s probably the polar opposite of what we saw earlier this week in something like the live-coding environment Overtone: Max’s UI is actively involved with you as you patch. There are visual tools for finding the objects you want, then visual feedback to tell you what those objects do, plus an always-visible reference bar and rewritten help. This more-active UI should make Max more accessible to people who like this sort of visual reference as they work. No approach will appeal to everyone – some people will find all that UI a bit more than they like – but Max’s developers appear to be exploiting as much as they can with interactive visual patching.

Multiple patches at once. New objects for filters and data, a 64-bit audio engine, and low-level programming are all well and good. But the change that may more profoundly impact users and workflow is be the way Max 6 handles multiple patches. Max – and by extension Pd – have in the past made each patch operate independently. Sound may stop when you open a patch, and there’s no easy or fully reliable way to use multiple patches at once. (Compare, for example, SuperCollider, which uses a server/client model that lacks this limitation.) That changes with Max 6: you can now operate multiple patches at the same time, mix them together with independent volume, mute, and solo controls, and open and close them without interrupting your audio flow. (At least one reader notes via Twitter that you can open more than one patch at once – I’d just say this makes it better, with more reliable sound and essential mixing capabilities.) Update: since I mentioned Pd, Seppo notes that the pd~ object provides similar functionality in regards to multiple patches and multi-core operation. This has been an ongoing discussion in the libpd group, so I think we’ll revisit that separately!

One upshot of this change: some users have turned to Ableton Live just to host multiple patches. For users whose live performance set involves Ableton, that’s a good thing. But it could be overkill if all you want to do is bring up a few nifty patches and play with them. Now, I think we’ll start to see more people onstage with only Max again. (Check back in a few months to see if I’m right.)

Here’s an overview of what’s new:

• Discoverability: A “wheel” makes the mysterious functions of different objects immediately visible; Object Explorer makes them easier to find, and new help and reference sidebar keep documentation close at hand.

• 64-bit audio engine

• Open multiple patches, solo and mute them, open and close them without stopping audio, mix audio between them with independent volume, and take advantage of multiple processors with multiple patches.

• Low level building blocks: You don’t get new synth objects, but you could build them yourself. New low-level data-crunching goodness work with MSP audio, Jitter Matrix, and OpenGL textures

• More JavaScript: An overhauled JavaScript engine makes JS scripting faster and more flexible, and there’s a proper text editor with syntax highlighting (though, of course, you may still prefer your own).

• New visuals: Vector graphics and “HTML5 Canvas-like” UI scripting (though to me it’s a shame this isn’t just the HTML5 Canvas). There are also massively-expanded Jitter powers, but those are best left to our sister site Create Digital Motion.

• Filters: New filter-visualizing tools for audio filter construction and manipulation.

• Dictionary data type and associated objects let you describe information in a more structured way (all kinds of potential here from control to composition)

• Projects now let you organize data, media, and scripts in the manner more associated with conventional development environments

• What about Ableton? No news on that front, but I expect more soon. Max for Live users will at the very least get the advantages above, since Max for Live is really Max inside Live.

Looking over all that Max does, I have to say, I’m really amazed. I wonder if computer musicians ever pause to consider how fortunate we are. Even if this isn’t the tool for you, its availability – compounded by the availability of a range of other tools – is itself worth reflection.

Max is a program that shouldn’t exist, doing a number of things it shouldn’t do, for a user base that shouldn’t exist, doing things they shouldn’t be doing.

It doesn’t make sense that you could maintain a commercial project for this kind of audience, that you’d wind up with something this mature and powerful that had a continuous lineage stretching back to the 1980s. It doesn’t make sense that musicians would embrace such a tool and produce invention. The only explanation is sheer love.

Then, even as Max reaches new heights, some of the alternatives you have for making your own music tools are simultaneously growing by leaps and bounds. They provide very different approaches to music making (compare Overtone and SuperCollider, or Pd and libpd, or AudioMulch, or new Web audio tools). There really aren’t many fields that have this kind of choice, free and commercial, in their medium. In science and engineering, there’s private and public funding, producing some amazing tools but nothing with this kind of meeting of power and accesibility. There’s just something about music.

The fact that Cycling ‘74 can maintain a business model – just as open source projects maintain volunteer contributions – is a testament to sheer passion and love for music, and a commitment to perpetually re-imagining how that music is made from an atomic level up. There was a wonderful piece on C creator and UNIX co-creator Dennis Ritchie, whom I remembered yesterday, that observed that what he did was to do what others said couldn’t be done. From Max itself to what people make with it, I think that fits nicely.

So, have a look at the public beta, and let us know what you think. The release of Max 6 has caused more people to ask what this means for Pd and other tools, or even whether to patch things from scratch at all, but I’ll leave that question to a bit later. (I do have my own opinion about which tool fits which circumstance and user, but that’s best left to a separate discussion.) For now, you can try Max yourself and see what the fuss is about. If it doesn’t fit your means of music-making, know that you have a wide array of other options – pre-built to low-level code to old-fashioned tape-and-mic approaches, and everything in between. Go out and listen and see what you discover.

http://cycling74.com/downloads/max-6-public-beta/

Montreal-based Damian Taylor, music director and engineer for Björk, is the subject of an epic interview on cycling74.com, spanning music, life in Montreal, working with Björk and what makes her special, and what patching in Max/MSP can mean compositionally and creatively.

Damian has some especially nice reflections on what having an open-ended music environment can mean.

If you’re a musician or composer, Max is an amazing tool that will really open up a completely different way of thinking about music. If you’ve been working on sequencers, looking at time lines, working on tape, or reading off musical scores, then without really realizing it you start looking at music in this very linear way and your brain gets formed into a lot of similar patterns.

But the Max environment provides this whole alternate way of thinking, a whole different flow. Suddenly your own ways of thinking about time and harmony and melodies and everything, expands completely. Music kind of changes shape, you see it from this whole different side. So it’s really, really, really, worth putting in the effort!

It’s a great and well-deserved endorsement for Max, but I think it’s deeper than than any one tool — this way of thinking could also be applied to tools like Pd, AudioMulch (saw a great workshop on that last week), Reaktor, or code-based languages like Csound and SuperCollider. Or, for that matter, I think this notion of thinking in non-linear ways can even be applied to playing your acoustic instrument. It really gets at the heart of how to unlock creativity, I think.

In case you’re afraid of Max or other languages, Damian has some advice there, as well:

If you’ve never done any code or computer language programming before, there are a lot of times where you just have to try to absorb things without really knowing what the hell they are for. And I mean that in the nicest possible way!

I just slowly worked my way through all the tutorials, largely without understanding what the hell I was doing, but just absorbing what was going on, trying to follow every step that was presented. And yeah, it really was a case of locking myself in a room. If there was another noise anywhere, I just couldn’t do it. It took really intense concentration; just trying to absorb what was going on and follow a tutorial from start to finish.

But then at some point I figured I needed to speed things up, so I got in touch with Harvestworks, in New York, who I actually was aware of through an interview on the Cycling ’74 web site. I got tutoring from Matthew Ostrowski — and it was amazing, a complete revelation.

But best of all, for folks using Max/MSP, Damian gives you a leg up, with his nice Woodpecker tool available as a free download for MIDI sequencing.

Woodpecker creates fast 16th note midi sequences from your keyboard input. It’s designed to allow you to bring this very electronic feel into a live ensemble, free of set tempos and click tracks. There are options to allow you to vary the feel of the sequence, play triplets, and explore various arpeggiation styles.

(Nice use of Topspin for a Max patch download! Clever!)

Here’s some music for Damian, as well:
Damian Taylor by MissManagement

damiantaylor.com
bjork.com

And absolutely read the full interview – it even has a nice shot of the Max rig in there:
An Interview with Damian Taylor [cycling74.com]

Full disclosure: this terrific interview is by Marsha Vdovin, who’s also CDM’s business development manager. Thanks for the great work on this, Marsha; I enjoyed reading it, anyway!

Producer Sam Greene was so in love with Aalto, the semi-modular, Mac and Windows soft synth whose developer we profiled last month, that he made his own place to share patches for it. Patches are free to download and use in your music, and you can upload your own; the only restriction is that the site asks that no one re-sell the patches themselves. Find the results:
patchdump.com

You can thank the synth for making it easy. While discussion of sharing features often turns to sophisticated cloud and social features, here’s one solution: just make exchanging files dead-simple. As the patchdump.com site puts it:

Sharing patches for the Aalto synth is easy. It’s just an XML file – a simple text file that the synth uses to make settings and configure all the patch cords. You can copy your presets right from Aalto by using the menu command: “Copy to Clipboard”. All you need beside that is an audio sample of your patch.

Viva XML. (That’s the same thought I had recently when I solved some batch processing of sessions in Ardour, a DAW which uses a simple, understandable XML format.)

In fact, Sam notes he was interested in sharing other instruments, too, but file format complexities made that difficult. That leads to a question: have you got a favorite synth that uses simple, text-based file formats?

Producer/composer and Reaktor super-guru Peter Dines is back with a new concoction for Native Instruments’ graphical development environment for sound. Entitled the Reaktor Sample Pack, it’s a collection of three granular sampling instruments. Updated with new download links (no more divshare!)

Frame is a looping sampler with smooth/crossfading, envelope controls, and built-in saturation, plus graphical loop point selection. Free | download

Loupe is a “polyphonic looping slicer,” which is to say you can slice up a sample and assign it to different MIDI keys. Press a note, then graphically set loop playback parameters from reverse to envelope to filter. US$15 via link below, or get Loupe + Mirage for US$22.50 | download

Mirage is a granular sampler that focuses on ambient textures, by creating snapshots of various parameters. There’s some deep sonic functionality in there, including an LFO with a “whirl” effect (and accompanying whirly graphic widget), per-voice filtering, global envelope and EQ, and tons of grain-level controls. US$15 via link below, or get Loupe + Mirage for US$22.50 | download

They also all look lovely with Reaktor’s recently-overhauled UI. Pete isn’t just a good programmer, though; he’s a talented producer, so I’ll let the sound samples speak for themselves:

Peter Dines Sampler Pack – Frame 2 by peterdines

Peter Dines Sampler Pack – Loupe drums by peterdines

Peter Dines Sampler Pack – Mirage demo by peterdines

And here’s a look at Mirage’s UI; click through for a bigger version:

If you have Reaktor, I can’t imagine any argument for not picking these up. Through the end of February, you can pick up all three for US$22.50, and Frame alone would keep you busy for free.

Full details on Pete’s terrific Modulations blog at Noisepages:
Introducing the Reaktor Sampler Pack

If you’re interested in using this in Ableton Live, read on for Reaktor+Live tips. If you’re a fan of Maschine, Pete has also been putting Reaktor and Maschine together while testing the upcoming Maschine 1.6, and he’s got some fantastic tips:

Ableton users…
More on routing Reaktor in Live: multi out audio UPDATE: VST works too, not just AU [PS - little tip, VST is usually a safer bet than AU on the Mac because so many AU plug-ins actually use compatibility layers]

Maschine + Reaktor (and Loupe!) Maschine 1.6 beta just dropped!

And if you love running patterns at different lengths, routing patterns into one another, good stuff:
Sound to Sound MIDI routing in Maschine 1.6

Thanks for the great ideas, Pete. Well worth checking the rest of his site:
http://modulations.noisepages.com/

The beauty of physical, human motion is that just about anything kinetic, any gesture can work. If you were left only with motion in your toes, you could play a live set. And whereas these gestures were once tied to specific acoustic instrumental effects, in the digital realm, they can be anything.

We’ve seen the rise of the grid controller, popularized by the monome and later seen in mass-market devices like the Launchpad and APC. And while it’s hardly the first “big knob as controller” concept, we’ve seen the encoder celebrated in the monome follow-up arc. So, buttons – check. Encoders – check. How about faders?

Herrmutt Lobby has been building simple Max for Live patches that do more with less. Beat Fader assigns note triggers to control points spread along a fader. This is similar to what the monome community have built with a row of buttons, but instead with continuous input. The fader still works like the buttons – instead of tapping a toggle, you move past a control point, for eight events. As you’ll see in the screen patch, the patch itself doesn’t do much; it’s really up to how you configure your Live set.

In a similarly economical invention, Counter increments a series of notes from a single trigger.

The advantage of Max for Live is that these little creations, long the sort of thing that’d make up a larger patch, now can be dropped as modules into a Live performance set. But you could easily use this idea outside Max for Live, in any tool that processes MIDI events, and with or without Ableton.

As usual, performance virtuosity is what makes the difference. There’s a nice thread on the monome forum about this to read – thanks to them for inspiring this story.
Beatfader [monome community]

Grab the patches for free (if you haven’t already gone and made something similar yourself, though these have nice preset control, etc.):
Beat Fader
counter lobby

Controllers seen above:
Novation Nocturn, street about US$90
Hercules DJ Console, I think the MK2, street around US$250 (but variants available much cheaper)

One video to take us out:

What if you could make any device or any software a re-programmable musical instrument, effect, or soundmaker? Your phone could be a touch-controlled effect, your tablet a sketchpad for interactive drum sequencers. Patches assembled on your desk on a computer could be taken with you in your pocket. And what if you could do all of this for free, using a time-tested environment?

libpd, authored by Peter Brinkmann, takes on that vision. It’s a way of making Pure Data (Pd), the visual development tool for interactive music and media, more accessible across a range of applications and gadgets. It lets you embed Pd pretty much anywhere. It’s not a new version of Pd. Instead, it makes use of the standard, “vanilla” distribution of the free and open source software. What’s different is that it separates the sound processing part of Pd from the part that talks to audio hardware, allowing Pd to run on a greater variety of mobile devices and inside other applications.

libpd:

• turns Pd into an audio synthesis and processing library
• liberates Pd from GUI and drivers
• allows for easy communication between Pd and the code into which it is embedded (so you can send and receive messages with your Pd patch)

Today, a team of developers and testers (including myself) is releasing the first version of libpd. It’s free to use on any device you wish, and free to modify. Because of its licensing, you can even build commercial applications with it. (That is, yes, it’s open source – but yes, it can also be useful if you’re a commercial developer. You don’t have to choose.)

http://gitorious.org/pdlib | community discussion

We’re just pleased to have a tool that makes experimenting with sound and music quicker, easier, and more flexible and compatible. It’s more fun that way.

Supported Platforms, What You Can Make

Right now, today, you can use libpd with:

Android: Thanks to Google’s NDK (Native Development Kit), you can use libpd with any Android device running OS 1.6 or later. Note that devices without the Google Market are often non-standard in other respects, so your mileage may vary, but we’ve found a wide variety of devices work quite well, including the Motorola Droid and Droid X, HTC Legend, and Google NexusOne.

iOS: iPhone and iPad models with the latest, armv7 processors work (3GS, iPad); we’re working to extend compatibility across more devices. Working with Peter Brinkmann, the RjDj development team contributed (and continues to contribute) free code that’s making iOS support compatible and high-performance. But the Objective-C classes mirror the Android and Java classes, meaning the two will stay in sync, and once you’ve learned one, the other will be a piece of cake. (Or coffee. Or cocoa. Or whatever.)

In each case, you just need libpd, Pd for making your patches (graphically), and a copy of the SDK for each mobile platform you want to use.

Additionally, you will soon be able make user interfaces for libpd using cross-platform HTML5, via Chris McCormick’s project WebKitPd. (It’s not quite ready for consumption yet, but will also be free and open source.) Android was the impetus and initial test platform for libpd, so right now it’s the most mature. But we hope to improve iOS compatibility and testing next.

Some Sample Apps to Try for Android

libpd is really aimed at developers who want to embed Pure Data into mobile devices, games, and so on, and soon also people working with Processing, Open Frameworks, and the like.

But if you’re eager to try this out as an end user, there are a number of packages you can try. They don’t show off everything libpd and Pd can do, but they do allow you to load up something on your device and make some noise.

Download the test packages from the libpd site:
http://gitorious.org/pdlib/pages/Packages

It includes a scene player for RjDj (see below).

Among the code included in the repository is one complete app, Peter Brinkmann’s own Circle of Fifths. He tells us:

Circle of Fifths: I wanted a circle of fifths tool for the subway, with exactly this kind of GUI. It also nicely illustrates the newly possible separation of concerns — Pd only does DSP, and an elaborate GUI is built somewhere else. It’s a demo and not optimized for universal consumption. In particular, it’s a bit CPU hungry because it’s actually simulating six Karplus-Strong strings in real time.

Of course, if string simulation is what you want to do, this also illustrates that you can – even on a phone.

Chris McCormick has created two libpd-based apps, one of which I feature in the video above. Can of Beats also makes use of WebKit as its UI rendering engine. Chris describes what he’s made:

Can of Beats: This is a procedural hiphop beat generator. The beats are generated using simple hand-crafted probability weightings for each type of sound at each position in the beat. In the Android app, you can also input simple melodies or basslines to go along with the beats.
http://mccormick.cx/projects/CanOfBeats/

Garage Acid Lab: This is an algorithmic, 303-style acid bassline generator. The app will make you an infinite number of different acid bass lines and garage style beats. You can also have some fun with the cutoff filter and delay unit settings with a kaos-pad style input. I want to work on this app a bit more to provide an ‘advanced’ mode which will let you write custom basslines, beats, and have more control over the effects. http://mccormick.cx/projects/GarageAcidLab/

RjDj, RjDj team. If you don’t know it by now, RjDj is a fantastic application built on Pd that makes interactive musical and sonic experiences deliverable in the same way as a digital album, not only to musicians, but anyone who wants to experience music and sound in new ways. libpd makes use of code contributed by RjDj. Future development on RjDj will use libpd. (More on those libpd-based versions, and the evolution of RjDj and RjDj Voyager, soon.)
http://www.rjdj.me/

Where to Get It, Where to Get Involved

1. Get the library. To get started, download libpd from its Gitorious source repository:
http://gitorious.org/pdlib

You’ll need Pd, too, if you don’t have it; vanilla Pd builds are available from the official Pd download page.

2. Join the community. You can discuss patching for libpd, developing using Pd, and making instruments and effects and other sonic creations for gadgets everywhere on our new community group:
http://noisepages.com/groups/pd-everywhere/

That will be a location specifically dedicated to the unique challenges of working with mobile gadgets; of course, see also the other great community resources for Pd.

Who made this: libpd was conceived by a team including Peter Brinkmann, Hans-Christoph Steiner, and myself, with input from the RjDj team (particulary Martin Roth). It was primarily developed by Peter Brinkmann, who applied his talents and the work he has done in JJACK, a Java API for JACK, with additional contributions and testing by our team and by Chris McCormick. Major thanks to Martin Roth and the folks at RjDj, to Miller Puckette (creator of Pd), and the generous attendees of our first hackday at the NYC Patching Circle, along with others who are testing now.

Tutorial Next Week; Your Feedback Wanted

I’ve been preparing a tutorial for working with libpd Android (initially), to be followed eventually for developing on iOS devices once we have a better handle on making that go smoothly. We’ll have a complete tutorial for you by next week. Processing is then my next priority.

An FAQ will also be available by then. That means, first, ask some questions!

Got specific questions about what this is for? How to get started? What you’d like to see in the tutorial? Ask away.

And please do get the discussion going not only here in comments, but in the Pd Everywhere group. (Noisepages registration is now open; if you have any trouble, let me know and I’ll sort you out.)

Let’s start with what’s really important: Chris McCormick’s squeakyshoecore tunes may well make you tap your All Stars and smile. The words “algorithmically-generated acid” and mention of the multimedia patching environment Pd might not suggest feel-goody, cheery, geeky-sounding electronic grooves, but that’s exactly what’s come out. These robots know what they’re doing.

And yes, even a tune named after Chris’ favorite fractal can be good summer fun.

Behind the scenes, Chris’ music is produced generatively using algorithms created in the free and open source visual patching and programming environment Pure Data. The patches actually began as a scene for the iPhone/iPod touch interactive music environment RjDj, but you can now grab all the patches, try them out, and learn them, all with an explicit GPLv3 open source license.

GarageAcidLab

It’s not just about sitting back and letting the robots do the work, either; you can control the results live with a MIDI controller.

Check out the tunes, which are themselves available under a Creative Commons license (BY-NC-SA):
http://sciencegirlrecords.com/chr15m/squeakyshoecore/
On Archive.org / CC-licensed download page

And read the blog:
http://mccormick.cx/news/tags/squeakyshoecore

And great work, Chris. I hope that soon we can work with Chris and others to get some more information for newcomers to Pd on making their own musical creation and performance tools.