imclab / maxmsp-londonmusichackspace

Tutorial material for London Music Hackspace MaxMSP workshop

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maxmsp-londonmusichackspace

Tutorial material for London Music Hackspace MaxMSP workshop.

BASICS

Use of Max 6 Projects. Implicit dependencies.

1-VIDEOTRACKING

Warming up with some video input and processing.

video-101 (vna Andrew Benson)

Simple video capture.

• qmetro to generate frames (possibly dropping)

• we unpack the incoming frames into red, green and blue components

• jit.slide adds optional time-blurring for areas getting brighter and/or darker

thresholds

Movement detection in different areas of the image.

• frame-by-frame difference information, on frames which have been converted to monochrome

• jit.slide for temporal smoothing

• second black/white thresholding to flatten the greyscale introduced by the jit.slide

• jit.3m for simple averaging into a multislider trace

• motion-intersection: create one (or more) hot-spots by down-sampling with a low-resolution matrix and masking

• sound-generation (make-sound): simple gating, with a line generator to take off any sharp edges (needs a volume control - but Max 6 has one built-in)

2-NEWTON (via Rob Ramirez)

Simple physics modelling - with a bit of sound.

newton

• using Jitter and OpenGL for display. A jit.gl.render renderer to a named context, a single jit.gl.gridshape sphere, and a jit.gl.handle for manipulating the scene

• use of attrui to configure attributes (possibly persisted by the objects themselves)

• adding physics: jit.phys.body (attached to gridshape) in a jit.phys.world (attached to render): the body will fall under gravity); the world can be "reset"

• add a jit.gl.physdraw for visual "debugging" and a jit.phys.picker for picking things up

• the worldbox constrains movement to a fixed space

• constraints - add a jit.phys.hinge with position1 and position2 to position the hinge and the object it's attached to

• duplicate the body and hinge (with a new body name) - place the hinges side by side

• scaling issues: turn up gravity

• behaviour: add some restitution, experiment with damping

• turn on collision detection - and unpack dictionaries to gather impulse messages

• simple FM synth (good for metallic bell sounds): takes a MIDI pitch (transformed into frequency) and an amplitude (transformed into attenuation in dB)

• two cycle~ objects (carrier, modulator); two line~ objects as envelope generators

• magic modulator factor of 3.5

• synthesiser is velocity sensitive, for both volume (carrier) and "brightness" (modulator)

newton-modular

• code clean-up: an abstraction for the shape, body and hinge (one-body)

• world and context are now both named (WORLD, CTX) so that the abstraction patcher is always seen by the main patcher (for illustrative purposes; when the patchers are instantiated the parent world and render context will find them)

• one-body arguments: body name, hinge position, note played on collision

• each one-body has its own synthesiser

• (some) use of pattrstorage - to see restitution values (a better use would be, say, hinge positions and lengths - possible exercise)

• external animation: extra inlet to one-body to allow impulses - attach to video burglar alarm