Some Background

On the advice of my advisor noting a “well fortified” set of classes taken so far, I am taking a class this semester in a different area from my normal electrical engineering classes. The class covers Max/MSP, a visual programming environment for audio and video processing. I am more interested in the audio side, but all of it is technically DSP and a great way to keep certain bits of my signal knowledge sharp.

It has been refreshing but also really challenging because I’m not so used to visual programming languages. I have even had a bit of an unhappy experience with LabView, preferring the TCL and python scripting directly over GPIB.

Early impressions

I’ve been quite surprised with the struggles I’ve had with MIDI early on. Seems to be a lot of tooling that has replicated functionality. I think this will be the start of a series of posts covering certain areas like MIDI and so on.

I’m not sure if this means the user libraries are more interesting or potentially more frustrating to use as a result of the DIY-everything mentality this program seems to enable.

I have only been taking this class for a few months so I have yet to see all that is offered, but I wanted to post about things I have been up to.

I made some attempts to make a basic “Hello world” external object, but I have some things to learn before I get that working. I am spoiled by developing so much code on Linux!

Until Next Time

Gonna get into jitter a lot more this week. I want to try and get my simple additive synth working with a bit more MIDI stuff and maybe get the MIDI to show in the live step sequencer that comes with the Live tooling. I think that will be one of my posts later on, as I want to make a “standard” MIDI file and input patcher to re-use for other synths and such.

Max/MSP is a quirky visual programming language, but the potential with MIDI has me excited to connect some of my older gear (like my Arduino granular synth that I made in undergrad).