Max/MSP

chava

Well-known member
Good stuff here. What you using?

Ableton. No softsynths, no plugin, not even a soundcard (maybe that's why it sounds kinda scrappy and "clips"). After experiencing too many crashes I chose the bare minimum approach, so it's more a necessity than a deliberate choice.
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
Ableton. No softsynths, no plugin, not even a soundcard (maybe that's why it sounds kinda scrappy and "clips"). After experiencing too many crashes I chose the bare minimum approach, so it's more a necessity than a deliberate choice.

So just samples then?
 

chava

Well-known member
Not using plugins saves me from worry with new installs/crashes. Having a laptop with no internet connection helps as well.
 

qwerty south

no use for a witticism
There are extremes you can go to like having breakbeats going a gazillion miles per hour, but does anyone actually want to listen to that? Does it make for good music?

Squarepusher is the guy for doing this for decades on end but is also capable of
 

version

Well-known member
I think new music tech has always done little more than redirect work flow, and what was perceived as new was the circumstance of the time. As much as acid house was new, it was also the 303 and the roland drum machines redirecting creative energy already out there in psychedelic (particularly krautrock), dance and punk.

we may have already run the gauntlet on electronic sounds, so the effect of max/msp will be less stark than the changes brought about by past tech. But I imagine this stuff will bring about a change in focus, what returns. From the little I know about max/msp and pure data, seems like live performance/improv could be most affected, as devices like the organelle (pure data) offer alot of power while remaining intensely playable
... I invoked Walter Benjamin, because without degenerating into the nothing-will-ever-happen-again time of postmodernism, his philosophy suggests a kind of temporality where creating a new society doesn't necessarily involve a linear advance towards the glorious future, something about which we have every right to be dubious, and which the right does just as well as the left – note the Blairite language of 'modernisation', or of 'no turning back'.

V.I Lenin gave a wonderful definition of dialectics which sums up what I was trying to do, I hope successfully:

'a development that, as it were, repeats stages that have already been passed, but repeats them in a different way, on a higher basis - a development, so to speak, that proceeds in spirals, not in a straight line; a development by leaps, catastrophes and revolutions; ‘breaks in continuity’... the interdependence and the closest and indissoluble connection between all aspects of any phenomenon (history ever revealing new aspects) - these are some of the features of dialectics as a doctrine of development that is superior to the conventional one.'
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
In principle I'm quite interested in things that get you away from normal paradigms for thinking about organizing music - piano rolls, keyboards, fretboards, staves etc - and into a world where you're forced to think about stuff differently. But I guess that by this point a lot of these things, like modular synths and algorithmic composition, have started to evolve normal paradigms of their own.

I've tried Pd a few times in the past, but always seemed to slam up against the fact that it's too low level for the sort of thing that I actually want to do - like, I don't particularly care about implementing totally new forms of synthesis (and if I did, I'd probably learn Faust or something) and I also don't want to have to keep building oscillators, envelopes and filters from scratch. And I never came across much of an ecosystem of standard implementations of normal audio stuff to overcome that hurdle and start actually doing stuff that I'm musically interested in without having to spend forever debugging the stuff that ought to be building blocks. Is Max/MSP similar? Or does that fact that it's commercial and has a decent sized userbase mean that someone's already ironed out some of the shonk from the learning curve?

I find some of the live coding stuff that's been developed over the last few years quite interesting - that seems like it might have interesting results if and when crosses over from techies who think it's cool that they can make (mostly terrible) music by coding to musicially interesting people who are willing to invest a bit of learning upfront to have a flexible and expressive way of controlling stuff...
 
Top