Last week I had the privilege of visiting Stetson University’s Digital Arts Program in DeLand, Florida. I knew Nathan Wolek from the early days of MSP, at which time we were both grad students: Nathan working on the GTK Granular Toolkit while I was working on Tap.Tools . We later worked together on bringing Hipno to life.

Time goes by quickly and I had never had the chance to see the program that Nathan is shepherding at Stetson. Knowing Nathan, and having caught the occasional glimpse of the Mobile Performance Group on Youtube (see video above), I figured that some good things were happening. But… Wow! The program is completely amazing.

The first thing they’ve done is truly collaborate across disciplines and across departments. I’ve seen lip service to this at too many institutions to mention, but at Stetson they are actually doing it. It’s pretty exciting to see. The faculty of the digital arts department bring expertise in digital audio, sculpture, realtime video performance, electronics, etc.

Two things really stood out during my visit. One was a show by Stetson faculty member Matt Roberts entitled Waves Walks . I find it difficult to put my finger on what was so ‘right’ with the works in this show, but I think part of it had to do with how all of the elements both within the works and between the works integrated so well to form an extremely strong impression. The different works sonically engaged different spectral regions so as to not interfere with each other but rather work together to make it feel as though you were fully immersed in a surreal coastline environment.

Following a day with 3 lectures (one focused on MaxMSP, one on music technology and entreprenuership, and one on listening, aesthetics, and electronic music history/literature), I had a day to discuss the future of the GTK with Nathan. And I also had another standout moment from the visit: a meeting with Stetson student Eric Baum.

Eric showed me his Max patcher, which is a more evolved version of this Max patcher . He was producing some really interesting results. To make it performable, he showed me a double-neck guitar that he had built and retrofitted with a bunch of sensors, some of which he made himself. Here’s the part that really blew me away: he had been using an Arduino and switched to the Teabox. Why? Because the results he got were so much better.

The Teabox gives much higher resolution, a lot faster, and the electronics in the Teabox do a significant amount of signal conditioning to produce more usable results. It’s pretty cool to hear about someone who can pull together the skills and experience to make an Arduino work, then turn around and replace it with a Teabox because it works so much better! It was nice way to wrap up a really great trip.

My thanks to Nathan and everyone at Stetson for their gracious hosting, spotless organization, and an inspiring experience!

Jesse Allison, co-founder of Electrotap, successfully defended his doctoral dissertation this past week for a Doctor of Musical Arts degree. His dissertation pulls from concert music, installation art, computer science, anthropology and sociology, not to mention the electrical engineering and software development he has done in his work building Electrotap.

Congratulations to Jesse on this fantastic achievement!

Cycling ’74 has a new Edge forum dedicated to the cutting-edge, out-front, public-beta of new features kind of discussions.

The first installment is audiounit~ . Max/MSP has needed this object for a long time. Now it’s publicly available — enjoy!

I’m not sure who maintains this, but right now they rank this blog as #3 on the list of top Max/MSP sites:

http://www.topsite.com/best/max/msp

With the recent Cycling ’74 website overhaul, a few things were pruned from the old site structure. One of them those things was ‘./share’ section.

My own ./share page featured mostly things I did about 10 years ago – so the material is quite old. However, I thought I should make those materials available here for archival purposes.

GUI Stuff

Signal Meters — a group of signal meters built with lcd and created to be used in bpatchers. This includes tap.AquaGain~ – an Aqua themed stereo meter/slider combo.

tap.bpatch_vText — A bpatcher which displays text rotated by 90 degrees in either direction. Built using the LCD object.

Audio Stuff

BarleyProcess~ — An older granular patch I adapted from Nobaysu Sakonda’s granular patches (ca. 1998)

8space — 8 In/8 Out Audio Spatialization Matrix with graphical location controls and real-time gesture recording/playback and manipulation. (ca. 1999)

A vastly improved spatializer interface is included with the examples that ship with Jitter if you want to take a look at that…

tap.bink~ — This is an alternative port of Miller Puckett’s bonk~ object. This port was originally done by Ichiro Fujinaga in 1999 for my piece Chinese Food II (for Chopsticks & Computer). When Max 4 came out I did some updating to get it working again, and then some additional work to make it (sort of) work with OS X.

For most purposes you are probably better off using the canonical port of bonk~ . Requires Tap.Tools 1.2 or higher (see below) to be installed. Source code included.

Wave Editor

TapTools Edit — This is a wave editor that I started building in Max/MSP. It is now unsupported / unmaintained, but may have some tidbits to interest folks. (ca. 2001)

Tap.Tools

Tap.Tools is set of over 100 objects (externals, sub-patches, javascripts, etc.) that I originally developed while working on pieces or projects. It is composed of audio/MSP objects like reverb and pitch-shifting, some regular max objects, and some video related objects such as delay and motion- tracking. For more information, check out the Tap.Tools web page.

Other Unfinished Projects

iNset Toolkit v0.1 — Set Theory Analysis on a MIDI stream using Pyrite. (ca. 2000)
As of the release of Max 4.5, JavaScript has essentially taken the role that Pyrite used to have in Max 3.5. It should be reasonably straight forward to port the code from Pyrite to JavaScript if that is interesting…

SuperCollider Compatibility Lib — A very humble start on a package of abstractions to make porting SuperCollider patches to Max/MSP easier… (ca. 2001)

I recently read a post about the platform stats of Cornerstone (the Mac SVN client). They broke down like this (about 5 weeks after Snow Leopard had shipped):

• Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger 4.7%
• Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard 86.8%
• Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard 8.5%

They can do this analysis, probably, because they have the registration system built into the app, which can transmit the platform version info to them. We can’t do that with Tap.Tools because there is no network exchange when you authorize your software. However, we can get some statistics about the readers of this blog. They look like this:

• 35.8% – Safari Mac
• 25.2% – Firefox Mac
• 17.3% – Firefox Win
• 14.7% – IE Win
• 2.27% – Chrome Win
• 1.1% – Firefox Linux

So it’s about a 60/39/1 readership on Mac/Windows/Linux. That’s roughly what I would have guessed. I am a little surprised how many mac users are using Firefox though — that’s a pretty strong number.

A new website has launched over at Cycling ’74. It’s smoother, faster, leaner, easier-on-the-eyes, and the search is a awesome.

For frequenters of the website, most important is probably the new forums. They are so much faster — and the search is orders of magnitude better. Like with any big transition like this, there are probably some bugs and bumps in the road likely to appear — but the beauty of the web is that nothing is permanent and bug fixes roll out immediately. Kudos to everyone at Cycling ’74 who was involved with this overhaul!

And… just in time for the Max4Live release!