[HOWARD SANDROFF DEMONSTRATING THE USE OF CYCLING ’74 MAX/MSP]

HOWARD SANDROFF: I can open up a Max patch that can actually generate sounds. So, what we’re listening to before was a Max match that was talking MIDI to a MIDI tone generator.

GRETCHEN HASSE: Mmm hmm.

HOWARD SANDROFF: But now, we can actually make sound now. Admittedly, this sound is not going to be very interesting, but you have to understand th level of complicity to even do this is significant.

Okay. So this is just a little basic signal processing. Perhaps that just does audio oscillation, and it holds -- it has all the Max components in them except now you can actually generate sounds, and that makes Max/MSP a very, very powerful tool because of course you can do synthesis on this platform, you can do MIDI on this platform, you can take control signals in and out.

Actually I’m working now with a little circuit card where you can actually control mechanical things like servos and motors from Max. And as a programming language, it’s become very, very sophisticated and has become for some degree kind of a de facto standard of synthesis. A lot of institutions are teaching Max as am I, and the students have the opportunity to, you know, learn a great deal from it.

[HOWARD SANDROFF PLAYING A MAX/MSP PROJECT]

GRETCHEN HASSE: So, what are we looking at right now?

HOWARD SANDROFF: Oh, this is just something from one of their tutorials that is set up to control a comb filter, and it just has a sort of an automated process that’s taking a pulse wave and filtering it at a variety of different frequencies.

[HOWARD SANDROFF PLAYING A MAX/MSP PROJECT]

But I mean you have to -- maybe for people just coming into this now, this doesn’t seem like a big deal, but if you’ve grown up with this stuff, the ability to do this at home is just monumental. I mean it’s just amazing. I mean, at MIT, in the early ‘80s, I would have to wait eight hours to do a digital-to-analog conversion...

GRETCHEN HASSE: Yeah.

HOWARD SANDROFF: ...to be able to hear the work that I’m doing, and now I can do it in real time, and I can do realtime processing, so a patch, not unlike this except much more complicated, I’ve used. I have a work called “Tephillah” which is for clarinet and live signal processing, and all the signal processing is done in real time in Max using a series of patches designed for them.

This is something from the tutorial. It’s just an additive synthesis patch, and what we have here are six operators set up in parallel. An operator is a sine tone oscillator and an envelope generator. The envelope generator is controlling the amplitude of that sine tone, and there are six of them, all set up and mixed together. And if you look, you will see that there are six little boxes called “partials”, and if we double click on one of them, you will see the patch that’s inside that box. So, it’s a patch inside the patch.

GRETCHEN HASSE: Okay.

HOWARD SANDROFF: Okay, and this patch inside the patch, it has all the components necessary to generate a sine tone. This object called the cycle object is actually the program that generates the sine tone, and then the rest of these are our little individual objects that manipulate the amplitude and then are connected to the digital-to-analog converter, and there are six of them, and we determine frequency as a ratio of the frequency settings of the very, very first one. I can do something like this...

[HOWARD SANDROFF DEMONSTRATING A PATCH IN MAX/MSP]

...and change the attack characteristics of this. First of all -- I’m sorry -- Let’s change the attack characteristics of the fundamental meaning we’ve created now a harmonic whose multiplier is one, so it gets the fundamental of this complex sum.

GRETCHEN HASSE: Okay. So, hit it.

[HOWARD SANDROFF DEMONSTRATING A PATCH IN MAX/MSP]

HOWARD SANDROFF: Okay. So now we’re generating a set of partials that are for the most part even numbers, and we will get something that sort of sounds like an organ.

[HOWARD SANDROFF DEMONSTRATING A PATCH IN MAX/MSP]

You hear more than one octave.

[HOWARD SANDROFF DEMONSTRATING A PATCH IN MAX/MSP]

I’m not sure how to describe this sound but you’ll notice that it has a very, very sharp attack and that it has partials that are not just integer values but are a little manipulated from integer values. So for instance, instead of this being a multiple number 5, it’s actually 4.98, and that gives a little bit of character to the sound.

[HOWARD SANDROFF DEMONSTRATING A PATCH IN MAX/MSP]

I guess this is an attempt to sound something like a clarinet. It has a very prominent third partial, which would be typical of clarinets, mostly odd number. I guess they’re all odd numbered, and that would be correct.

[HOWARD SANDROFF DEMONSTRATING A PATCH IN MAX/MSP]

And of course, if we manipulate the characteristics further...

[HOWARD SANDROFF DEMONSTRATING A PATCH IN MAX/MSP]

This is kind of interesting because what we have are all six operators that have a frequency somewhere around 1, so the ratios are 1, 1.01, 1.02, 1.04, 1.05, and 1.06. So, what we’re going to get is we’re going to have six mistuned unisons at 880 Hz, and so you’re going to hear lots of beating and other kinds of shimmering sorts of sounds.

[HOWARD SANDROFF DEMONSTRATING A PATCH IN MAX/MSP]

HOWARD SANDROFF: And each envelope is delayed, so that the onset of each sound is later than the one before it. Well, not quite; they’re a little asymmetrical.

[HOWARD SANDROFF DEMONSTRATING A PATCH IN MAX/MSP]

So first you hear one and then you’ll hear two and then three and four and five and six.

[HOWARD SANDROFF’S “TEPHILLAH” PLAYING]