Welcome back to Modulations and I wanted to spend a little time tracking my learning experiences around the programming language that is Max (including MSP and Jitter, to name a few of the collection of technologies that make up Max).

I was initially confused over what Max is and what MSP is but it’s in fact pretty straightforward, Max is the logical language, where we can process messages, computations, strings and arrays; the sort of things you would come across in other programming languages. MSP on the other hand is the signal processing language, where we handle audio signals, audio buffering and so on.

Well that is my simplified description for the sakes of this Modulations journal post.

One of the other dilemmas I often have when learning a new programming tool, is being patient! I want to instantly make some great sounds but it is well worth reading the built in manuals for both Max and MSP, to better understand how the both work, their similarities of which there are many and where things are different in MSP.

The tutorials mostly come with examples you can open but also I love the built in reference guides that describe how for example groove~ works, with a working example, that you can copy and paste into your own patch.

Like with a lot of things, patience is required but there are sooooo many great resources out there to get you going, copy and paste into a new patch, make tweaks, look up which objects do what and then tweak them, break them, learn why they broke.

I’ll share video or two below, all recorded using OBS and then some video editing software. Apparently there is a piece of software called Syphon recorder, I have downloaded it but not figured out yet. I’ve some visuals that I want to output to MP4, to share here on Substack, plus I would like to know how to output audio to MP3 etc, to share here.

I’m keeping a log of questions that I have and will gradually get there.

A modular synth of some sort would be cool, with some visuals.

Learning from others

I thought this video was incredible, I shared it on Notes earlier on but I am sharing again here because I know a number of you probably only really care for the emailed newsletters.

Looking in the description for this video I found that he’d shared part of this patch and so I pasted it into a new patch and had a listen, the sound initially was reminiscent of wind or lapping waves on a shoreline, a sounds that you could think of as being white noise I guess.

The great thing though is that I can play with this project that can be found at https://pastebin.com/rcR3Ksyk and explore what it does, tweak it have fun with it.

It does remind me of a recording I made a month ago at the Crofton Beam Engine over in Marlborough.

I used QuickRecord, that I have just discovered under the extras menu.

The video I created via OBS:

I would like to thank Hearing Glass | Umut Eldem for the above, as I built this based on his video and now I need to keep track of the patches I’ve downloaded, the ones I am working on and so on. One great option for this, will of course be GitHub, as I use that for all of my other coding projects outside of sound design and music.

Tell you what — I am going to have a load of fun with this.

Just need to figure out how to create MP4 videos from visualisations, if anyone knows, please let me know in the comments. For example, the video above used jit.world and I want to record that output.

Anyway stuff for another day….see you all soon.

Nick.