An introduction to Max

Dom Aversano

What is Max / Jitter / Max for Live / RNBO?

Max is a visual programming language originally developed at the catchily named Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique in Paris, better known as IRCAM. Now developed and maintained in San Francisco by the company Cycling ‘74, it is widely regarded as one of the quintessential tools for people who desire a deeper level of control over their sound and visuals. In short, if you can imagine it, you can build it.

Max/MSP is a standalone visual programming language that allows you to build and compose beautiful-looking instruments, effects, sequencers, and anything else you can dream up, without having to get into the intricacies of code. Instead, you use patch cords to connect different modules, in a manner that more resembles the physical world. Max is also capable of creating standalone programs.

 

Jitter is the visual part of Max/MSP, not a separate program. It allows you to create visuals, edit videos, or control lighting in the same patching environment in which sound occurs. There’s no need to find elaborate ways to make distinct sound and visual environments talk to each other — it’s built into this system. Your sound and visual environment are all under one roof.

Max for Live integrates the above into the highly flexible digital audio workstation (DAW) Ableton Live. This means you have audio programming, visual programming, and a world-class sequencer complete with effects and instruments combined into one program. It’s incredibly powerful, which helps to explain why it’s so popular. Whether you want to make an album, an installation, or a live show combining audio and visuals, it’s all contained within Max for Live.

RNBO

RNBO is one of the most powerful aspects of Max. Without having to write a line of code it allows you to export your Max patches for use outside of Max. Using RNBO you can create audio plugins for DAWs, programs that run on Raspberry Pi, and export to C++ or Web Assembly for building desktop, mobile, or web applications.

This video gives a neat overview of its capabilities.

Who uses Max?

Many well-known artists use Max such as Autechre, Holly Herndon, Pauline Oliveros, and Björk. All of these artists are pioneers who benefit from being able to customise and design their software, using an elegantly designed that makes it intuitive and enjoyable to do so.

Why learn Max?

Most people learn Max/MSP because they have a project that they want to create that cannot be realised in standard commercial software. While the thought of learning to program might be intimidating, Max makes it far more approachable and achievable for those who do not have years of their life to dedicate to learning to code in programming languages like Supercollider, Python, or C++.

How long does it take to learn?

As with all things, it depends to what level. If you have a basic understanding of synthesis and sound design then making a simple synth or effect should not take very long — perhaps a few weeks. To gain a solid foundation in Max takes time, practice, and some dedication, making 3-6 months a ballpark time-estimate for getting to grasp with the fundamentals.

How to get started!

First, you need a bit of motivation. The best of all is if you have a project in mind that you want to build. To witness something that you previously only imagined starting to take form is a great way to stay motivated and learn. Piece by piece you can start building your bespoke musical universe, inspiring you to push further and develop more of your ideas.

Finally, another great tutorial for exploring the potential of Max is Umut Elder’s course on stochastic music. Beyond the fancy name, stochastic music simply refers to music that contains various random processes. By having a degree of randomness enter into music it helps give one’s music and visuals a sense of unpredictability and spontaneity.

Finally…

Remember to have fun! If you enjoy what you’re doing you’ll do more of it. Happy building!

A Q&A with Max for Live expert Phelan Kane

Dom Aversano

Music Hackspace tutor Phelan is a Berlin & London-based music producer, engineer, artist, developer and educator. He currently runs the electronic music record label Meta Junction Recordings and the audio software development company Meta Function As the course leader for our new Certified Courses program Learn Max for Live, we asked him to answer a few questions about Max for Live. 

 

We’re delighted to be featuring your Certified Course on Max For Live, tell us a bit about who you are and how you’ve developed as a producer and sound designer?  

My name is Phelan Kane and I am a Berlin and London-based music producer, engineer, artist, developer and educator. For almost thirty years I have been active in both the music industry and the contemporary music education sector, with a focus on electronic music and alternative bands. I have worked on music for artists such as Placebo, I have supported Depeche Mode on a European tour as part of the Fad Gadget band and I have taught music tech to members of Radiohead. I am one of the first Ableton Certified Trainers in the world and since 2021 I have been one of only three dual Ableton and Max Certified Trainers. I have released music on the labels Bulletdodge and Meta Junction Recordings and I currently run the audio software development company Meta Function.

Where did it all begin for you and how did you get your first break? 

Back in 1994, my Tutor at Audio Engineer College recommended me for an assistant engineer position at a studio owned by a band member of his. From there I went to work on lots and lots of music with projects at big studios in the UK such as Townhouse, Mayfair, Livingston, Metropolis, Rockfield, Monnow Valley and for labels such as Universal, WEA, Polygram, Mute etc etc.

So tell us about this course what will you be covering? 

This course will explore how to make your own sound design, synthesis and sampling devices in Max For Live via Ableton Live Suite. With these tools, you can create novel devices/plug-ins that no one else has access to which will empower you to create unique electronic sound for music, game and media projects.

What are some of the most salient bits of career advice you’ve been given along the way? 

Explore as many tools and techniques as you can. Be open-minded and absorb all types of music and media.

Why did you choose to teach a live online course over a click-and-watch pre-recorded one? 

Live online courses are much more rewarding for the students. They can ask questions and receive mentor support through their learning journey. 

So what can students expect to learn from the course and the experience of studying with other peers online?

They will learn the necessary latest skills, techniques and first-hand industry insight into the methodology, workflow and tips and tricks to create unique devices and patches in Max For Live.  

Check out Phelan’s certified course Learn Max for Live

 

Book Review: Supercollider for the Creative Musician

Dom Aversano

Supercollider for the creative musician.

Several years ago a professor of electronic music at a London University advised me not to learn Supercollider as it was ‘too much of a headache’ and it would be better just to learn Max. I nevertheless took a weekend course, but not long after my enthusiasm for the language petered out. I did not have the time to devote to learning and was put off by Supercollider’s patchy documentation. It felt like a programming language for experienced programmers more than an approachable tool for musicians and composers. So instead I learned Pure Data, working with that until I reached a point where my ideas diverged from anything that resembled patching cords, at which point, I knew I needed to give Supercollider a second chance.

A lot had changed in the ensuing years, and not least of all with the emergence of Eli Fieldsteel’s excellent YouTube tutorials. Eli did for SuperCollider what Daniel Shiffman did for Processing/P5JS by making the language accessible and approachable to someone with no previous programming experience. Just read the comments for Eli’s videos and you’ll find glowing praise for their clarity and organisation. This might not come as a complete surprise as he is an associate professor of composition at the University of Illinois. In addition to his teaching abilities, Eli’s sound design and composition skills are right up there. His tutorial example code involves usable sounds, rather than simply abstract archetypes of various synthesis and sampling techniques. When I heard Eli was publishing a book I was excited to experience his teaching practice through a new medium, and curious to know how he would approach this.

The title of the book ‘SuperCollider for the Creative Musician: A Practical Guide’ does not give a great deal away, and is somewhat tautological. The book is divided into three sections: Fundamentals, Creative Techniques, and Large-Scale Projects.

The Fundamentals section is the best-written introduction to the language yet. The language is broken down into its elements and explained with clarity and precision making it perfectly suited for a beginner, or as a refresher for people who might not have used the language in a while. In a sense, this section represents the concise manual Supercollider has always lacked. For programmers with more experience, it might clarify the basics but not represent any real challenge or introduce new ideas.

The second section, Creative Techniques, is more advanced. Familiar topics like synthesis, sampling, and sequencing, are covered, as well as more neglected topics such as GUI design. There are plenty of diagrams, code examples, and helpful tips that anyone would benefit from to improve their sound design and programming skills. The code is clear, readable, and well-crafted, in a manner that encourages a structured and interactive form of learning and makes for a good reference book. At this point, the book could have dissembled into vagueness and structural incoherence, but it holds together sharply.

The final section, Large-Scale Projects, is the most esoteric and advanced. Its focus is project designs that are event-based, state-based, or live-coded. Here Eli steps into a more philosophical and compositional terrain, showcasing the possibilities that coding environments offer, such as non-linear and generative composition. This short and dense section covers the topics well, providing insights into Eli’s idiosyncratic approach to coding and composition.

Overall, it is an excellent book that every Supercollider should own. It is clearer and more focused than The Supercollider Book, which with multiple authours is fascinating, but makes it less suitable for a beginner. Eli’s book makes the language feel friendlier and more approachable. The ideal would be to own both, but given a choice, I would recommend Eli’s as the best standard introduction.

My one criticism — if it is a criticism at all — is that I was hoping for something more personal to the authour’s style and composing practice, whereas this is perhaps closer to a learning guide or highly-sophisticated manual. Given the aforementioned lack of this in the Supercollider community Eli has done the right thing to opt to plug this hole. However, I hope that this represents the first book in a series in which he delves deeper into Supercollider and his unique approach to composition and sound design.

 

 

Eli Fieldsteel - authour of Supercollider for the Creative Musician
Eli Fieldsteel / authour of Supercollider for the Creative Musician

Click here to order a copy of Supercollider for the Creative Musician: A Practical Guide

Dom Aversano is a British-American composer, percussionist, and writer. You can discover more of his work at the Liner Notes.

Move slow and create things

Dom Aversano

Over Christmas I took a week off, and no sooner had I begun to relax than an inspiring idea came to mind for a generative art piece for an album cover. The algorithm needed to make it was clear in my mind, but I did not want to take precious time away from family and friends to work on it. Then a thought occurred — could I build it quickly using ChatGPT?

I had previously resisted using Large Language Models (LLMs) in my projects for a variety of reasons. Would outsourcing coding gradually deskill me? Whose data was the system trained on and was I participating in their exploitation? Is the environmental effect of using such computationally intense technology justifiable?

Despite my reservations I decided to try it, treating it as an experiment that I could stop at any point. Shortly prior to this, I had read a thought-provoking online comment questioning whether manual coding might seem as peculiar and antiquated to the future as programming in binary does now. Could LLMs help make computers less rigid and fixed, opening up the world of programming to anyone?

While I had previously used ChatGPT to create some simple code for Supercollider, I had been unimpressed by the results. For this project, however, the quality of the code was different. Every prompt returned P5JS code that did exactly what I intended, without the need for clarification. I made precisely what I envisioned in less than 30 minutes. I was astonished. It was not the most advanced program, but neither was it basic.

Despite the success, I felt slightly uneasy. The computer scientist Grady Booch wrote that ‘every line of code represents an ethical and moral decision.’ It is tempting to lose sight of this amid a technological culture steeped in a philosophy of ‘move fast and break things’ and ‘it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission’. So what specifically felt odd?

I arrived at what I wanted without much of a journey, learning little more than how to clarify my ideas to a machine. This is a stark contrast to the slow and meticulous manner of creation that gradually develops our skills and thinking, which is generally considered quintessential to artistic activity. Furthermore, although the arrival is quicker the destination is not exactly the same, since handcrafted code can offer a representation of a person’s worldview, whereas LLM code is standardised.

However, I am aware that historically many people — not least of all in the Arts and Crafts movement — expressed similar concerns, and one can argue that if machines dramatically reduce labourious work it could free up time for creativity. Removing the technical barrier to entry could allow many more people’s creative ideas to be realised. Yet efficiency is not synonymous with improvement, as anyone who has scanned a QR-code menu at a restaurant can attest.

The idea that LLMs could degrade code is plausible given that they frequently produce poor or unusable code. While they will surely improve, to what degree is unknown. A complicated project built from layers of machine-generated code may create layers of problems: short-term and long-term. Like pollution, its effects might not be obvious until they accumulate and compound over time. If LLMs are trained on LLM-generated code it could have a degradative effect, leading to a Model Collapse.

The ethics of this technology are equally complicated. The current lack of legislation around consent on training LLMs means many people are discovering that their books, music, or code has been used to train a model without their knowledge or permission. Beyond legislating, a promising idea has been proposed by programmer and composer Ed Newton-Rex, who has founded a company called Fairly Trained, which offers to monitor and certify different LLMs, providing transparency on how they were trained.

Finally, while it is hard to find accurate assessments of how much electricity these systems use, some experts predict they could soon consume as much electricity as entire countries, which should not be difficult to imagine given that the Bitcoin blockchain is estimated to consume more electricity than the whole of Argentina.

To return to Grady Booch’s idea that ‘every line of code represents an ethical and moral decision’ one could extend this to every interaction with a computer represents an ethical and moral decision. As the power of computers increases so should our responsibility, but given the rapid increases in computing power, it may be unrealistic to expect our responsibility to keep pace. Taking a step back to reflect does not make one a Luddite, and might be the most technically insightful thing to do. Only from a thoughtful perspective can we hope to understand the deep transformations occurring, and how to harness them to improve the world.

Build an interactive textile instrument

This practice-led course will show you how to make an electronic textile interface for music performance. We will learn a DIY technique to craft with e-textile materials and then explore how to make music with the handcrafted interface in a number of ways. Each session will follow on from the last, developing your knowledge through a series of hands-on projects, delivered in four online workshops. 

Level: beginner with notions of DIY electronics and programming

  • Some familiarity or experience of working with Arduino and/or Max/MSP (or similar platforms) is desirable
  • A tabletop space to work at
  • Computer, with USB port
  • Arduino IDE (Free – download here: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software)
  • Max 8 (Free 30 day trial available – you will be instructed to download this for the final session)

This workshop is available internationally. Please order your DIY kit before the dispatch date for your location. Kits will be posted using a Royal Mail tracked service.

UK dispatch date: Friday 17th November

Worldwide dispatch date: Friday 3rd November

We will work with the Lilypad Arduino, a microcontroller board designed for use with e-textiles and wearables projects, and Max/MSP, an object-orientated programming language for music making. The workshop series will cover the fundamentals of working with e-textiles and these technologies, giving a basis for participants to continue to develop their creative ideas when working with sound and interactive textiles.

Tues 24th Nov, 6pm UK –  Workshop 1: Crafting an e-textile interface

In this workshop, we will explore an approach to working with electronic textiles and handcraft. This workshop will introduce needle felting as a DIY method of working with e-textiles. We will make an interactive and touch sensitive textile interface, to then be used in a number of ways, throughout the four sessions of this course. Through crafting the brightly coloured interface, we will explore a creative approach to interface design and learn how traditional crafts can be combined with e-textile materials to result in novel interfaces for music performance.

Tues 1st Dec, 6pm UK – Workshop 2: Bringing your craft work to life: capacitive sensing and visualising sensor data with the Lilypad Arduino

In this session, we will transform the needle felted piece from Workshop 1 into an interactive and touch sensitive interface. We will introduce the Lilypad Arduino and explore capacitive sensing as a method of bringing your textile work to life. You will learn several approaches to visualising interaction data on screen, as well as the fundamentals of working with Arduino IDE.

Tues 8th Dec, 6pm UK – Workshop 3: Composing through code: making an e-textile step sequencer with the Lilypad Arduino

This week, we will develop our coding skills and learn an approach to using your e-textile interface with the Lilypad Arduino, as a standalone music making device. We will write, edit and compose through code, to create a playful step sequencer that makes music as you touch the textile interface. 

Tues 15th Dec, 6pm UK – Workshop 4: Interactive textiles and Max/MSP

Workshop 4 will introduce a method of using your handcrafted interface with Max/MSP. From this workshop, you will know how to program your Lilypad Arduino, to allow your e-textile interface to control parameters in a Max patch. We will make a software-based sampler, where pre-recorded sound files are triggered by touching the interactive textile interface. Some familiarity and a basic working knowledge of Max/MSP is desirable, but not essential. Participants with experience in Max are welcome to bring their own patches to experiment with.

A DIY kit, with all of the craft tools and materials you will need, is included in the workshop price and will be posted to your home in advance of the course.  

There are two kits available, please select the kit that you will require: 

Kit 1 is a full kit and includes a Lilypad Arduino and all of the craft tools and materials you will need for the course. 

Kit 2 includes all of the craft tools and materials you will need to make the e-textile interface, but does not include the Lilypad Arduino and USB cable. 

(Kit 2 is best suited if you already have a Lilypad Arduino or would prefer to use an alternative board. Please note that this course focuses on working with the Lilypad and so support for alternative boards will be limited and only recommended for more experienced participants.)

Kit 1 contents:

  • Lilypad Arduino
  • USB cable
  • 10 x crocodile clips
  • Speaker
  • Wool 
  • Steel wool
  • 3 x Needle felting tools 
  • Embroidery hoop
  • Fabric
  • Copper tape

Kit 2 contents:

  • 10 x crocodile clips
  • Speaker
  • Wool 
  • Steel wool
  • 3 x Needle felting tools 
  • Embroidery hoop
  • Fabric
  • Copper tape

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