MaxMSP (Audio)

Rather than this being an experimental stage of my project, I am instead using this week to research, explore and learn as much as I can about the coding program MaxMSP. I intend to incorporate this piece of software into the final performance of my glitch orchestra. I intend MaxMSP to work in the following ways:

MaxMSP & Arduino: I will be using a number of electrical devices (TVs, Video Players, 2 x Projectors, CD players, Tape Players, Video Game Consoles), which will make up the instruments, sections and core components of my Glitch Orchestra. I do not want all of these devices to play at the same time, and aim for them to switch off and on randomly via the mains switch. After some initial research, I found that one possible way of achieving this would be to hook the mains of the various devices to an Arduino device, which is linked to MaxMSP (running on my mac). Then, via my mac I intend to control the mains of the attached devices with a simple randomized patch. Whist in theory this sounds achievable and relatively simple to execute, this is an entirely new program language that I have never used before. So, in order to get achieve my dersired results, I have started with the vary basics of MaxMSP, and have been using the following tutorials -

Max MSP Audio Video

To build basic audio patches. Whilst this is an extremely slow learning process, I am making some steady progress and have managed to recreate some of the patches that are featured in the videos, and have started to work my way through the in-house MaxMSP (audio) tutorials, in order to learn all of the objects and their functionality. As this software is completely new to me, and this is the first time I have used a coding program of this kind, I have decided to keep my patches as simple as possible. I aim to recreate and edit pre-made patches in order to use them for my desired purposes. I think working from scratch will be too much to achieve in such a short amount of time. Fortunately, I have a friend who has used the program before, who will be guiding me through my patch design and coding process.

Glitch Audio: In addition to the random patch that will be working with the devices, I aim to run the pre-glitched audio (from experiment 7) into MaxMSP and through another basic patch that will glitch the audio clips further within the program. This audio will again be randomly outputted (using another version of the random patch) via two speakers and will feature as part of the digital audio section of the orchestra.