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.

This is the example of a little bit more complicated patch that uses our timing functions. So what you'll notice here is that I have an object called a transport. That transport is essentially the same kind of object as what you'd see up here, the Global Transport, that is to say it lets you set information like tempo and to basically find out information and to slave things like our metronome to this particular transport. You'll notice I've given it a name, "Chalk", and this metronome is connected to this transport called Chalk. So when it runs, it will basically keep time to itself here. I've given it another one over here called "Cheese", and this metronome is slaved to Cheese, and so what happens is I've got two self-contained, individually synchronized time structures that I can run at the same time.

We've added some new objects in Max that let you work with it, so here's an object called Time Point, and what this object does is it essentially keeps an eye on tempo, and when it reaches that bar, that beat, and that unit, it will do what you tell it to, in this case send a bank. So what I've done is load VST plugin, so let's launch -- so I've loaded a VST patch in now.

[GREGORY TAYLOR PLAYING A MAX PATCH]

So what I've done here is I've built a patch that performs Steve Reich's piece "Piano Phase", so all I've done is I've created a list of notes. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the piece, it's a very famous early minimal piece, and what you essentially do is you have a sequence of notes and you play them at the same time, and one of them begins to slightly vary in time until the two go out of sync with each other, and if they get out of sync far enough, eventually they come back around and they're in sync. So what I've done in this patch is I've created a Max patch that does exactly that. Let's take a quick look at it.

So here's my transport. It's basically running at this tempo here, and it just continues to run in that tempo all as well. For this patch over here, what I've done is I've set up my time point so that at a certain point, it basically multiplies the tempo and essentially shortens the length over which happens so these objects are essentially referencing the same pitches, but as they run they very slowly go out of sync with each other to produce Steve Reich's "Piano Phase".

[GREGORY TAYLOR CONTINUES PLAYING A MAX PATCH]

So here you can see it going in and out of sync. It's very slow. It's very subtle. Now that Max is able to understand and work with time, you're now able to do things like this that are basically controllable, synchronizable, and can run entirely independently or driven by the same source material as you decide to do.

That's certainly not the only new thing that Max does but we don't have all day and I'm sure that there are other things that you want to look and hear about. So we just like to say feel free to download Max from our web site. It's available and runs for 30 days.

And I guess the other thing I should mention to you that's coming up, it's kind of interesting, is that for the first time in our corporate life we are doing a user conference, just like big companies do. Actually, it's going to be a chance to get together with our users and since our users do such interesting things, we're all kind of looking forward do see what happens. It's going to be April 22nd to 24th of next year, it'll be in San Francisco, and there will be more information available to you as time goes on. If you're a serious Max-head, we think it might be something you'd find kind of interesting. And although it will be an interesting concert for users, we're kind of looking forward to doing it because unless things go wrong people don't always tell us what kind of jaw-droppingly cool things they do with our software, so part of the reason for us to do these things, and so we get to find out what cool stuff is going on that people forgot to tell us about.

Thanks very much for your support, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the show.