Just occasionally (Spitfire Audio please note), I get invited to music business events, so I was very pleased when the Music Hackspace (Based in Somerset House, London, although in these Covid-19 times, maybe 'Online' is a better location!) informed me about an interesting event in the middle of January... (I'm a MH 'mailing list' subscriber, and thoroughly recommend the Music Hackspace if you are into music technology...)
So 3pm GMT on Saturday, the 16th of January 2021, found me videoconferencing on Zoom.us, taking part in the first 'Max meetup Europe Edition'. Max is the commercial 'visual programming' language for multimedia published by Cycling '74 (Miller Puckette, one of the original authors of Max at IRCAM in France, has also released an open source branch called PureData)
After the usual welcomes and intros, there were two short presentations on projects using Max:
One (above) from Phelan Kane on using Weather metadata in a MaxForLive device to control music generation in Ableton Live (I loved the use of the 'dict.view' dict viewer object to give the hierarchical list), and another (below) from JB on exploring dual sampling and pitch manipulation using two instances of the 'groove~' object. Now I have to declare here that I'm a great fan of the groove~ object, and I have been working on a sample processing device using it for far too long, but that's another story. Here's a tease partial screen-shot showing one of the two groove~ objects...
My main 'go to' object at the moment is the live.grid object, but not with the chucker~ object that it is supposed to be used for. Instead I mis-use it to provide a neat user interface to some probability functions. And that is another story as well...
Breakout
After this, attendees distributed themselves into breakout rooms (including chill rooms for those who didn't want to go too nerdy). I joined the MaxForLive breakout room because I've been doing more M4L than Max for quite a while. Now maybe I should do more Max, but TAS, as I've been saying too much...
The conversation started around MIDI Controllers. There's something about people who program Max For Live - they often seem to have a keen interest in MIDI Controllers, interfacing them, emulating them, reimagining them in M4L inside Live, etc. As usual with any discussion of MIDI Controllers, the topic of 'Custom' came up. I'm not immune to this, I have a half-built custom MIDI Controller made using the Makey Makey device, and I backed the Kickstarter Ototo project with the aim of turning it into a custom MIDI Controller. But DIY hardware is tricky (although I do like the occasional mod here and there...) and so the latest incarnation, the Yaeltex.com 'we built your custom MIDI Controller for you, was shared and there was lots of 'oohing' as everyone imagined something custom... This set us along a thread of 'MIDI Controllers' you may not have heard about, and it turns out that Yaeltex do some predefined controllers as well (like the 'MiniBlock2' shown here).
Mapping
Things then got a little bit philosophical as the discussion went into programming, particularly going 'deeper' than Max or MaxForLive. We talked about Gen, which took us to JUCE, and then to SOUL, then via Bela, and ended up with C++ or even DSP assembler. I think Axoloti was mentioned too, but no-one dropped in Faust. It struck me that this whole topic needed some sort of map, so I produced one:
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