Max

Last week I participated in the Teatrix workshop organized by BEK at USF Verftet in Bergen. The idea was to explore technology in a stage setting. The people participating were: Paola Tognazzi, H.C. Gilje, Gisle Frøysland, Marie Nerland, Trond Lossius, Thorolf Thuestad, Tim Place, Iver Findlay, Linda Birkedal, Alexander Refsum Jensenius, Georges Gagneré, Anders Gogstad. The most interesting for me was the chance to work together with Tim Place and Trond Lossius on Jamoma, and during the week we had the chance to discuss and develop quite a lot....

Bob L. Sturm at UC Santa Barbara: {.imagelink}VLDCMCaR (pronounced vldcmcar) is a MATLAB application for exploring concatenative audio synthesis using six independent matching criteria. The entire application is encompassed in a graphical user interface (GUI). Using this program a sound or composition can be concatenatively synthesized using audio segments from a corpus database of any size. Mahler can be synthesized using hours of Lawrence Welk; howling monkeys can approximate President Bush’s speech; and a Schoenberg string quartet can be remixed using Anthony Braxton playing alto saxaphone....

{#image113}Dan Trueman and Perry Cook at Princeton have set up an undergrad course called PLOrk: Princeton Laptop Orchestra, where they have 15 workstations consisting of Powerbooks, sound cards, sensor interfaces and spherical speakers. The idea is to give students the chance to improvise and experiment with electronic music in a really hands-on way (more info). Great idea! We should try and set up something like that in Oslo.

Forbes.com writes about Charles Jorgensen who is working on what he calls subvocal speech recognition. He attaches a set of electrodes to the skin of his throat and his words are recognized by a computer even when he is not producing any sound.

{.imagelink}I’m participating in a workshop in Bergen, and got to meet Gisle Frøysland who is developing MøB, a software for installations and realtime manipulation of digital media in GNU/Linux-based networks. I am looking forward to seeing it in action during the course of the workshop.

{#p102 .imagelink}I have joined in as a developer of Jamoma, and am currently porting parts of the Musical Gestures Toolbox using this framework. One of the most exciting new things is that Trond Lossius has now rewritten/patched everything so that the whole framework is using Open Sound Control messages for all communication. This helps organizing the inner workings of the patches, the flow between modules in Max, and also opens for easier communication with other progamming environments and platforms....

Just came across the UBC Max/MSP/Jitter Toolbox which seems to be quite similar to Jamoma. The UBC Max/MSP/Jitter Toolbox is a collection of modules for creating and processing audio in Max/MSP and manipulating video and 3D graphics using Jitter. I have just briefly tested it, and here are some screenshots from one of the example patches. {.imagelink}

{#p95 .imagelink}dbv is a customizable vj tool built with Max/MSP/Jitter. Simple, but with some nice implementation details. I particularly like the way it displays video thumbnails, and adds extra pages if you have more videos than it is space for in the preview pane.

{#p94 .imagelink}traer.physics is a particle system physics engine for the Processing video programming environment. The user community of Processing seems to be growing rapidly these days, and from my few tests of the language it seems to be stable and efficient. Would be interesting to see if it is possible to combine Processing with Max/MSP/Jitter. OSC is one option, but it would be nice if someone made a wrapper so that it could be possible to run Processing from a Max object....

{.imagelink}Clavia has recently released a new version of their software for Nord Modular which now includes the possibility to create new settings based on evolution algorithms. These algorithms were part of the PhD work of my colleague Palle Dahlstedt from Göteborg, and makes it possible to create new settings from a set of “parents”. Very interesting stuff! The software is available as a free download for both Windows and OSX, but of course you need to have a Clavia synth to really appreciate this…