Lecture 14

Introduction to MSP (and digital sound):

• Marc Ainger from Music teaches sound courses at ACCAD with Max/MSP
• Max/MSP books - 3 volumes

• Transforming Room Sound

• In MSP Tutorials:
  • "Introduction"
  • "How Digital Audio Works"
  • "How MSP Works"
  • "Audio I/O"
• ACCAD PCs:
  • plug a mic into front mic plug (or try your web cam's microphone)
  • right click on Windows speaker icon, "Recording Devices"
  • In Max: Options -> Audio Status
    • Driver: ad_directsound
    • Input Device: Microphone or USB device
    • Output Device: Speakers
  • may need to restart Max if starts giving errors
• "always on" MSP signals/objects/wires vs Max's ms messages
• combine signals via fan-in
• MSP objects: ~
  • dac~ or ezdac~ to output sound (Basics Tutorials 1, 3)
  • cycle~, *~, line~ (Basics tut 2)
  • more line~ (Basics tut 3)
    • value/duration
    • amp envelope
  • Routing Signals (Basics tut 4)

• Note Synthesis tutorials 1-5 (but not covering in class)

• lab:
  • get numbers from moving video: (motion? how much? where?)
  • drive a filter with those numbers (use "scale"!)
  • generate a tone: control its pitch and amplitude with numbers
  • use a cycle to control pitch, amplitude
  • drive the sound attributes with numbers from the motion analysis attributes

• Sound Input:
  • sampling tutorial 1: record and play samples
    • adc~, ezadc~: internal microphone or line in
    • record~ - collect sound into a buffer~
    • index~ and count~: jump to position and play through buffer~
    • play~: variable speed playback

• random samples (tut 2)

• groove~ - looping buffer playback (tut 3) patch demo/discuss

• record and play AIFF files (tutorial 6):
  • sfrecord~: record any msp source to file
  • sfplay~
    • can open multiple files and "play on cue" with numbers
    • seek, start/end for excerpts
    • get bang from right outlet at end of cue
• Polyphony Tut 1: using the poly~ object
  • examples/jitter-examples/video/quicktime/PolyMovie/
• other:
  • fiddle and bonk
  • Chordino
• lab:
  • make a patch that plays existing sound clips (or record new ones)
  • modify the speed of looping playback interactively