![]() ![]() He worked at Bell Labs and made MUSIC, the first widely used computer program for sound generation, in 1957. The program’s namesake, Max Mathews, made strives in real-time computer music three decades earlier. Max’s precursors are as varied as the program’s uses. While the program took a year, Max was unfit for commercial distribution until 1990, when Pucket and Opcode Systems patented the interface. By the mid 1990s, software company and music label Cycling ’74 took over all development of Max with a new feature called MSP, an extension program to Max, allowing for real-time audio synthesis, and the addition would eventually become synonymous with Max. And so I came up with the programming environment Max, to try to basically just make it possible for composers to customize what it did for whatever piece of music was they were working on.” The premiere was July 1988, and so it was time to write another program, and this time I decided to make something that was actually reusable. “The piece was by Philippe Manoury, and it was called "Pluton," it was for piano and electronics. Max would be the second program Puckette wrote for IRCAM, but the first to be indefinitely reusable. While many of the underlying ideas behind Max arose in the rich atmosphere of the MIT Experimental Music Studio in the early 1980s, Max would take its form throughout a heated, excited period of brainstorming and experimentation among a small group of researchers and musicians, composers, and performers at IRCAM during the period of 1985-1990. And so there was a piece coming up, and I was hired to help work on it,” Puckette explained. They had the hardware all very well down, but they didn't actually have any idea how to write software for doing real-time music performances, and so every time anyone did a piece of electronic music at IRCAM, they would have to have the software custom-written for that particular piece. “It was being paid by IRCAM, which was the 'Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique,' which is this research institution in Paris that was run by Pierre Boulez. ![]() Talking to Puckette in San Diego where he teaches at UCSD, he explained how Max was developed in 1988, at IRCAM, because he had a concert scheduled. ![]() Its simple form denies its most innovative qualities, as it’s creator Miller Puckette once noted, “Most of what is essentially Max lies beneath the surface.” It scrambles and deforms and filters a complex landscape of sound sources, and yet can be used in an intuitive way. It can connect anything to anything else. Its interface is minimal yet utilitarian, with a protocol for scheduling control and audio sample computations, an approach to modularization and component intercommunication, and a graphical representation and editor for patches. ![]()
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