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.

In the old days, Max understood time in terms of what you see here, the metronome. Everything was requested in milliseconds. And of course, if you're an artist, or somebody who works with audio and video, you'll realize there's a whole lot of other ways to do time, so Max 5 now has new ways of working with time. You can specify Max time using the old ISO standard for hours, minutes, and seconds, so you'll notice that I've now set it to do 500 ms this way. We can specify time in Max in terms of frequency so as I change the MHz rate, I've altered the rate at which that flashes, and we can also do it in terms of samples. All those are ways that artists work with time, but there are other ways to understand time that musicians use that we've tried to pay particular attention to in Max 5, so here's some new examples of musical time.

So here's a metronome that understands time in terms of quarter notes. What I have in Max now is something called the Global Transport, and the Global Transport is like the transport on your sequencer. So in my extra folder up here, I'll open it up and I'll bring it up and turn it on, and the Global Transport has a tempo that it knows about, so when I now click on this object to run, I'm clicking in time with the tempo at quarter notes, and I can choose other time variations that musicians know and love.

So here's an example of setting new time. This is eighth notes here, and you'll notice that my times change according to that. We can also specify times in ticks. If you're a serious sequencer weasel, you know that we basically use 1/80 of a quarter note to run stuff, and we now can basically metronomes in ticks, and we can also use the ever popular floor model DJ bars, beats, and units.