Max

From the web site of the Wireless Networking in the Developing World project: The massive popularity of wireless networking has caused equipment costs to continually plummet, while equipment capabilities continue to increase. By applying this technology in areas that are badly in need of critical communications infrastructure, more people can be brought online than ever before, in less time, for very little cost. We hope to not only convince you that this is possible, but also show how we have made such networks work, and to give you the information and tools you need to start a network project in your local community....

{#image164}We are currently working with the Phantom Omni haptic devices at McGill, but unfortunately they are rather expensive. I have been looking forward to test the Novint Falcon which is supposed to sell for around $100, but after being in touch with the company it seems like they will not start shipping devices before next year. I really think such devices will change the way we work with computers. The computer experience has been 2-dimensional way too long, and from my initial testing of 3D haptic devices shows how much potential is lying in this type of human computer interaction....

I had to brush up on my trigonometry to solve some mapping issues, and found this nice overview. Strange how much I have forgotten about these things, I really need to get back to my linear algebra books! I never really understood the point of learning those vector transformation things back when I studied maths, but now as I have to implement some 3d gesture models I see that it is actually very useful....

Just went to a lecture by Sidney Fels from the Human Communication Technologies lab and MAGIC[]{#mce_editor_0_parent} at the University of British Columbia (interestingly enough located in the Forest Sciences Centre…). He was talking on the topic of intimate control of musical instruments, and presented some different projects: GloveTalkII: “a system that translates hand gestures to speech through an adaptive interface.” Iamascope: a caleidoscope like thing, where users would see themselves on a big screen, as well as controlling a simple sound synthesis....

In a discussion on using OSC to communicate over networks, Darryl just mentioned that OS X (apparently starting from Tiger) has the possibility to send MIDI messages over the network. I wonder how I have managed to oversee this feature, since it is sitting there as an option right in the Audio MIDI setup. The help file reads: You can use the MIDI network driver to send and receive MIDI information between computers over a network....

My post over at the Open Sound Control forum: I guess we are all trying to get rid of MIDI, but as long as we have tons of gear around, it would be good to have a generic way of describing MIDI information in OSC. Perhaps I am missing something obvious, but I have looked around and haven’t found any suggestions for a full implementation of MIDI messages as an OSC address space....

Interesting comment from Create Digital Music: What I find especially interesting is how far ahead of the curve music software is — just the opposite of what you might expect. We have most drivers already shipping, with nearly all software either shipping already for Intel or promised in the next few months. While support is a bit spotty at the moment if you use a lot of plug-ins, I think most Mac musicians will be able to comfortably switch to Intel by the summer....

{.imagelink}The monome 40h is a reconfigurable grid of sixty-four backlit buttons, connecting with USB and communicating both MIDI and OSC (Create Digital Music Review).

There seems to be a lot of initiatives for making “higher-level” abstractions for working in Max/MSP these days. Now, I just came across a project at UCLA intended mainly for theater productions: Theater Max is the result of several years of work, lots of trial and error, and far too many hours of programming for us to count. What we now call Theater Max got its start in 2001 with a production of Eugene Ionesco’s Macbett....

{.imagelink}SPEAR is an application for audio analysis, editing and synthesis. The analysis procedure (which is based on the traditional McAulay-Quatieri technique) attempts to represent a sound with many individual sinusoidal tracks (partials), each corresponding to a single sinusoidal wave with time varying frequency and amplitude. It offers some great features, and I particularly like the possibility to easily select single partials and edit them directly. Most controls also work in realtime....