GREGORY TAYLOR: Hi. My name is Gregory Taylor. I work for Cycling '74, a company that makes a munity of programming environments for artists, videographers, choreographers, and installation artists. Our product is essentially called Max. It had its origins at IRCAM in Paris back in the 1980s, and it has since transformed into something rich and strange that allows you to work with messages, audio, images, and to interconnect them in interesting ways.

At this particular show, we're giving people a chance to take a little bit more serious look at Max 5, our first major real upgrade to the fundamentals of being able to use Max in a number of years. We think we've added a few interesting and exciting new features, and I'd like to just take a minute, and if you've never seen Max before, I'll show you a little bit of it and I'll show you some of the new things that it does as well.

Here's an example of a Max patch. It's really kind of simple. It's composed of individual units that we call objects. These objects have a very limited sense of their own destiny. Each of them exists to do certain kinds of things, and they respond to messages which are passed down these little patch cords that connect them, and when you connect them together, they will do various kinds of things.

This is a really simple example of a Max patch. All it is is a metronome, so you'll notice that when I click on this button, this turns our metronome on and off. This switches it. I've given this object an argument that says, "Every 500 ms, I want you to send a special kind of a message called 'bang' down this patch cord." When this object here gets a bang, it knows that its law in life and its destiny is to flash and to send a message that says, "Whatever you are born to do, do it now."

This number box allows me to control the rate at which that metronome flashes, so you'll notice that as I click and change this number and lower it, the number of times the metronome flashes goes up. All I'm actually doing is sending a number as a message.

Max objects are programmed by adding new objects to the palette. Here's an example of how we do this. This is new in Max. This is called the object palette. To create it, all you do is hold down the P and this now appears. So what I do if I want to take something new is here's the example of a message box. The message is now here, and I can put a new message in. I'll type 120, and now I'll connect this message to my metronome here, and when I click on this object now, it will send a message 120 just as if I've filled the number box in. That's how we program with Max.

Whatever you were born to do, do it now.