Notes: Since Mavericks, the Soft66lc SDR external has not been working in Max. Although I was not able to update the external, there is a temporary workaround.
Mac OS is hijacking the FTDI USB device with its own driver. You can unload the driver from terminal:
leap motion
radio?
vine
mbta
midi osc thing / chat
frame subtraction
vizzie
voice cancellation thing
max for live – granulator or convolution reverb
show basics of max
make a spectrum analyzer
make a pitch detector tweet thing
Assignment
Read Max tutorials 1-4
Hello
Bang!
Numbers and Lists
Metro and Toggle
Build a control panel that does nothing
in Max. It should look amazing. It should be the coolest control panel you can imagine. Use any objects, colors, shapes that you can find. But… it shouldn’t actually control anything.
Office hours: Tuesday 1-2 PM, or Tuesday 4-5PM, at the EPD office #401 at 161 Mass Ave. Please email or call ahead.
Assignments and class notes will be posted to this blog: https://reactivemusic.net before or after the class. Search for: ep-426 to find the notes
Examples, software, links, and references demonstrated in class are available for you to use. If there is something missing from the notes, please ask about it. This is your textbook.
Syllabus:
Everybody calls this course “The Jitter class” – referring to Max/MSP jitter from Cycling 74. You will learn to use Jitter. But the object is to create interactive visual art. Jitter is one tool of many available.
The field of interactive visual art is constantly evolving.
After you take the course, you will have designed projects. You might design a new tool for other artists. You will have opportunities to solve problems. You will become familiar with how others make interactive art. You will explore the connection between sound, video, graphics, sensors, and data. You will be exposed to to a world of possibilities – which you may embrace or reject.
We will explore a range of methods and have opportunities to use them in projects. We’ll look at examples by artists – asking the question: How does that work?
Topics: (subject to change)
Jitter
Matrixes
Reverse engineering
Visualization of audio
Visualization of live data, API’s
Video analysis (realtime)
Video hardware and controllers
Prototyping
Video signal processing
OpenGL
Other tools: Processing, WebGL, Canvas, 2d graphics
Portfolios
Live performance
Grading and projects:
Grades are based on two projects that you will design – and class participation. Please see Neil Leonard’s EP-426 syllabus for details. I encourage and will give credit for: collaboration with other students, outside projects, performances, independent projects, and anything else that will foster your growth and success.
I am open to alternative projects. For example, if you want to use this course as an opportunity to develop a larger project or continue a work in progress.
Office hours: Tuesday 1-2 PM, or Tuesday 4-5PM, at the EPD office #401 at 161 Mass Ave. Please email or call ahead.
Assignments and class notes will be posted to this blog: https://reactivemusic.net before or after the class. Search for: ep-341 to find the notes
Examples, software, links, and references demonstrated in class are available for you to use. If there is something missing from the notes, please ask about it. This is your textbook.
Syllabus:
Prototyping is the focus. Max is a seed that has grown into music, art, discoveries, products, and entire businesses.
After you take the course, you will have developed several projects. You might design a musical instrument or a plugin. You will have opportunities to solve problems. But mostly you will have a sense of how to explore possibilities by building prototypes in Max. You will have the basic skills to quickly make software to connect things, and answer questions like, “Is it possible to make something that does x?”.
You will become familiar with how other artists use Max to make things. You will be exposed to to a world of possibilities – which you may embrace or reject.
We will explore a range of methods and have opportunities to use them in projects. We’ll look at examples by artists – asking the question: How does this work?
Success depends on execution as well as good ideas.
Topics: (subject to change)
Max
Reverse engineering
Transforming and scaling data
Designing user interfaces
Messages and communication, MIDI/OSC
randomness and probability
Connecting hardware and other devices
Working with sensors, data, and API’s
Audio signal processing and synthesis.
Problem solving, prototyping, portfolios.
plugins, Max for Live.
Basic video processing and visualization
Alternative tools: Pd
Max externals
How to get ideas
Computers and Live performance
Transcoding
Grading and projects:
Grades will be assigned projects, several small assignments/quizzes, and class participation. Please see Neil Leonard’s EP-341 syllabus for details. I encourage and will give credit for: collaboration with other students, outside projects, performances, independent projects, and anything else that will encourage your growth and success.
I am open to alternative projects. For example, if you want to use this course as an opportunity to develop a larger project or continue a work in progress.
Around the year 1700, several startup ventures developed prototypes of machines with thousands of moving parts. After 30 years of engineering, competition, and refinement, the result was a device remarkably similar to the modern piano.
What are the musical instruments of the future being designed right now?
new composition tools,
reactive music,
connecting things,
sensors,
voices,
brains
Notes:
predictions?
Ray Kurzweil’s future predictions on a timeline: http://imgur.com/quKXllo (The Singularity will happen in 2045)
Are there patterns in the ways that artists adapt technology?
For example, the Hammond organ borrowed ideas developed for radios. Recorded music is produced with computers that were originally as business machines.
Instead of looking forward to predict future music, lets look backwards to ask,”What technology needs to happen to make musical instruments possible?” The piano relies upon a single-escapement (1710) and later a double-escapement (1821). Real time pitch shifting depends on Fourier transforms (1822) and fast computers (~1980).
Artists often find new (unintended) uses for tools. Like the printing press.
New pianos
The piano is still in development. In December 2014, Eren Başbuğ composed and performed music on the Roli Seaboard – a piano keyboard made of 3 dimensional sensing foam:
Here is Keith McMillen’s QuNexus keyboard (with Polyphonic aftertouch):
Here are tools that might lead to new ways of making music. They won’t replace old ways. Singing has outlasted every other kind of music.
These ideas represent a combination of engineering and art. Engineers need artists. Artists need engineers. Interesting things happen at the confluence of streams.
Analysis, re-synthesis, transformation
Computers can analyze the audio spectrum in real time. Sounds can be transformed and re-synthesized with near zero latency.
Infinite Jukebox
Finding alternate routes through a song.
by Paul Lamere at the Echonest
Echonest has compiled data on over 14 million songs. This is an example of machine learning and pattern matching applied to music.
Harmonic Model Plus Residual (HPR) – Build a spectrogram using STFT, then identify where there is strong correlation to a tonal harmonic structure (music). This is the harmonic model of the sound. Subtract it from the original spectrogram to get the residual (noise).
“Detetcting Drops in EDM” – by Karthik Yadati, Martha Larson, Cynthia C. S. Liem, Alan Hanjalic at Delft University of Technology (2014) https://reactivemusic.net/?p=17711
Polyphonic audio editing
Blurring the distinction between recorded and written music.
What is the speed of electricity? 70-80 ms is the best round trip latency (via fiber) from the U.S. east to west coast. If you were jamming over the internet with someone on the opposite coast it might be like being 100 ft away from them in a field. (sound travels 1100 feet/second in air).
Global communal experiences – Bill McKibben – 1990 “The Age of Missing Information”
There is a quickening of discovery: internet collaboration, open source, linux, github, r-pi, Pd, SDR.
“Robots and AI will help us create more jobs for humans — if we want them. And one of those jobs for us will be to keep inventing new jobs for the AIs and robots to take from us. We think of a new job we want, we do it for a while, then we teach robots how to do it. Then we make up something else.”
“…We invented machines to take x-rays, then we invented x-ray diagnostic technicians which farmers 200 years ago would have not believed could be a job, and now we are giving those jobs to robot AIs.”
We instantly recognize people and animals by their voices. As an artist we work to develop our own voice. Voices contain information beyond words. Think of R2D2 or Chewbacca.
There is also information between words: “Palin Biden Silences” David Tinapple, 2008: http://vimeo.com/38876967
Ableton Live example: Local file: Max/MSP: examples/effects/classic-vocoder-folder/classic_vocoder.maxpat
Max vocoder tutorial (In the frequency domain), by dude837 – Sam Tarakajian https://reactivemusic.net/?p=17362 (local file: dude837/4-vocoder/robot-master.maxpat
Harmonic Model Plus Residual (HPR) – Build a spectrogram using STFT, then identify where there is strong correlation to a tonal harmonic structure (music). This is the harmonic model of the sound. Subtract it from the original spectrogram to get the residual (noise).
This method was used to send secret messages during world war 2. Its now used in cell phones to get rid of echo. Its also used in noise canceling headphones.