Max

The concept of “mapping” is frequently used in the computer music community these days, and has also been used over the last couple of days during the Jamoma workshop. This reminded me about the distinction between mapping and conditioning, as frequently pointed out by Marcelo Wanderley: Conditioning: filtering, scaling and normalizing signals in a 1-to-1 mapping Mapping: creating couplings between multidimensional data sets, e.g. MxN. For clarity’s sake it is probably useful to separate between the two....

We have a Jamoma workshop in Brussels this week. Some of the major things we will be talking about, and working on, during these days is: FunctionLib: for handling various types of mathematical functions in a consistent manner. UnitLib: for converting between different types of units. Timing and structuring in modules and patches. Most of the time the first day, though, has been spent on general error solving and more random discussions....

Following an interesting thread on careers in Max/MSP, I came across a link to Joshs Rules of Database Contracting. I particularly like these ones: Ask Not Whats Possible: the question is not what you can do, the question is how much the client is willing to pay for it and how long they will wait. Time Substitutes for Money on a Logarithmic Scale: e.g cutting the time by 20% will require doubling the budget....

Peter Elsea recently announced an updated version of his Max/MSP tutorial. They are great at explaining many of the basics in Max/MSP, and I am very happy he has made the effort to write them up so neatly. However, I can’t help to think about the “old-school” approach to computer music, focusing on pitch classes, harmony, rhythm and MIDI control.

We have been working on the Giant Music Ball all day. Besides soldering, aligning all the sensors was the biggest challenge. Here is a picture from early on in the process: {height=“400”} I love cables… {width=“400”} Crossing the Karl Johan street in the city centre of Oslo: {width=“400”} Lots of people stopped by and wondered what we were doing. {width=“400”} If you are around, please stop by booth 33 and check it out: Friday 9-16, Saturday 10-17....

On Friday I appeared in an interview in Aftenposten, one of the larger newspapers in Norway. The interview describes a recently started collaboration between the Musical Gestures group and Terje Sagvolden’s group working on ADHD. More precisely, they are interested in using my Musical Gestures Toolbox and motiongrams for studying the movements of rats and children with ADHD.

{.imagelink}I have received a constant stream of questions for an Intel-version of the little MultiControl software I made many years ago. MultiControl makes it easy to use any standard game controller (HID compatible) to control music software through OSC or MIDI. Still only for OS X, but a Windows version will follow at some point. A UB-version of the application is now available here, and I will try and get around to making a Windows version one day....

Brad Garton has posted an interesting blog entry about how he works with many different computer music languages from within Max/MSP, including RTcmix, Chuck, CSound, Super Collider and Lisp. He could also have used Java, Javascript, Python, etc. I particularly like the idea of using Max as the basis for exposing students to many different types of programming languages and approaches, and will see if I can include some of this in my Max course in the fall....

The discussion about video standards for live processing has been summarised as: Codec: Motion.jpg (for interlaced footage) or Photo.jpg. Compression ratio/quality: Quality 80 is a decent baseline for.jpg, though you can crank as high as 97 to improve quality. Keyframes: Encode a keyframe on every frame so it’s ‘scratch-ready’. Alpha channels: For video containing alpha channels, PNG is the format of choice. Sounds like more or less the same conclusion that has been reached in the Jitter forum, when this question comes up there once in a while....

David Zicarelli has posted an interesting note about a new collaboration between Cycling ‘74 and Ableton. Ableton Live is one of the most popular and easy to use to use live electronics software tools, and Max/MSP is one of the most powerful and flexible, so this sounds very interesting.