9 ms·

Max/MSP: A visual programming language for music and multimedia

128 points by zaiste 7y ago

_def 7y ago
I don't know if you can use this with the Max standalone version, but here are plenty of devices for Max4Live (Ableton Live's integrated version of Max): https://maxforlive.com/ https://maxforlive.com/
raptorraver 7y ago
Opensource alternative Pure Data is also worth mentioning: https://puredata.info/ https://puredata.info/
- bloogsy 7y ago
  Seconding this: PureData is very good - used it throughout my second and third years of university to create soundscapes and scores. A little DSP knowledge is required to get really good, but very rewarding once you get the hang of it. Designing Sound by Andy Farnell is a great book to learn about ~PD and sound design in general: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Designing-Sound-Press-Andy-Farnell/dp/0262014416 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Designing-Sound-Press-Andy-Farnell/...
- wwweston 7y ago
  With puredata, is it convenient to either: * write/script your own "objects"/nodes in some conventional programming language * abstract a "patch" into its own node (thus writing a node in pd itself)
  - spacechild1 7y ago
    * there are various extensions for embedding python or lua. For the latter, checkout pdlua or ofelia. * yes, they are called abstractions. They also have a nice feature called “graph on parent“, where part of the abstraction's canvas will appear on the parent canvas.
    - wwweston 7y ago
      Excellent, thank you!
- strbean 7y ago
  There was a cool web implementation back in the day... https://github.com/sebpiq/WebPd https://github.com/sebpiq/WebPd Looks like the creator is gearing up to pump new life into the project (as of 11 days ago!). In the issue linked at the top of the README, he bemoans the fact that he hasn't really had any other contributors. If anyone is looking for an interesting project...
  - jancsika 7y ago
    If I had to guess, big blockers would be: 1. webpd doesn't have a GUI editor, so you cannot leverage the browser to prototype new ideas (or edit old ones). With that ability webpd would be like a codepen for audio and therefore garner a lot more interest. 2. Pd's gui logic mostly happens inside the audio engine which is coded in C. It's a huge hairball of code that's a pain to work with. 3. Pd's GUI paridigm is having multiple toplevel windows like the old Gimp interface. That's a pain to use in Pd, but it's especially a pain to try porting that to a browser. An HTML5 editor/display needs to be much less complicated than motif in a Linux window manager. I've been thinking about doing parallel work on a single-app style interface for Purr Data and shipping it with a feature flag. (Parallel as in not upsetting the current UI.) There has been some interest in such a project for GSoC, but it's a beast of a project with lots of little pain points and detail work to get it right.
  - strbean 7y ago
    Oof, how does this comment garner a drive-by downvote?
skybrian 7y ago
I've used PureData a bit and found the UI rather minimalist. VCV Rack has a UI that's considerably more fun, but from a programming perspective, most modules are quirky rather than orthogonal and general-purpose. How does Max compare?
- gmueckl 7y ago
  VCV Rack is firmly in the Eurorack tradition, which has an enormous amount of deliberate quirkiness to inspire experimentation and new sounds. Max is pretty a graphical programming language with a focus on signal processing, but a scope that goes considerably beyond that.
- stephencanon 7y ago
  Max and ~pd are roughly equivalent from a programming perspective. They have different ecosystems though, with a lot of overlap, but also with a bunch of differences.
jcelerier 7y ago
If anyone's interested - I'm working on ossia score (https://ossia.io https://ossia.io ; https://github.com/OSSIA/score https://github.com/OSSIA/score) which is a bit like Max & PD, but the dataflow is integrated directly in the timeline which allows for better expressibility of evolution of time in the artwork.
billfruit 7y ago
Does it do rhythm heavy scores with regular drum beats etc?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jm547ster 7y ago
  It can, however you’ll have to build your own sequencers or find other people’s work to cobble together
tayistay 7y ago
Max and Pd are interesting languages. Quoting the original designer, Miller Puckette [0]: "The design of Max breaks many of the rules of computer science orthodoxy, sometimes for reasons of practicality and sometimes of style." Audio and control signals are both represented in the same canvas, but with substantially different semantics. Audio signals are roughly what you might expect if you are familiar with analog audio processing: plug one box into the next, and data is constantly flowing. The control signals are actually messages (think MIDI), and can have some counterintuitive semantics. For example: if a single message is sent to two different objects, then those two objects send a message to a third (diamond shape), the third object will be executed twice, despite all of this happening in the same logical time-step. Execution order also depends on the position of the objects in the canvas, IIRC. The semantics are at least partially historical, because when Max was originally developed, real-time DSP wasn't available. [0]: http://msp.ucsd.edu/Publications/dartmouth-reprint.dir/ http://msp.ucsd.edu/Publications/dartmouth-reprint.dir/
- jancsika 7y ago
  > For example: if a single message is sent to two different objects, then those two objects send a message to a third (diamond shape), the third object will be executed twice, despite all of this happening in the same logical time-step. That's not an accurate description of the language's semantics. For example-- is the third object a unary or binary operator? Also-- for a unary object in a proper flow-based language, what happens if that third object is a unary operator like `sin`? I think the language/frontend cannot let you make the connection because it doesn't make any sense (or you'd end up implicitly overwriting one of the values/vectors). In a Max control chain you do get two outputs from two incoming connections to a unary operator. But then perhaps the programmer wanted to collect those two values into a two-item list and trigger that further down the chain. If they practiced "Fresco-based write protection" as they were trained, the diagram is encoded as spaghetti and we can never know for sure. :)
  - qmmmur 7y ago
    I mean, this kind of comment really only comes from someone who has never used the language in any kind of depth. Whether or not the object triggers twice depends on type of object as you pointed out, ordering of inputs forgetting whether or not two executions is perhaps intended.
jancsika 7y ago
Max is Max/MSP, where: * MSP is an engine for generating/synthesizing/analyzing realtime audio which the user builds as a diagram in a GUI. The backend automatically sorts the diagram into a graph and generates the audio as the user builds the program. So by the end, the programmer has used their ears to measure whether the program can indeed compute audio for the diagram in realtime. (And the corresponding classes for signal computation are designed with soft realtime scheduling in mind.) * Max is a general purpose programming language where the user creates and connects various branches of different Rube Goldberg machines together in a GUI. This appears superficially similar to DSP diagrams above. But each object in the chain can do anything from simple realtime appropriate math to doing file i/o while allocating large chunks of memory. There's no easy way to tell which of these Rube Goldberg objects are realtime safe. Plus one can iterate infinitely and recurse into already recursive chains of calls with ease. (The MSP engine prohibits recursion.) Due to lack of constant aural feedback for Max diagrams, users typically keep a separate, erroneous mental model of all the Rube Goldberg machines in their short-term memory. In fact, most users practice a novel form of cryptography I call "Fresco-based write protection": the user keeps drawing and connecting more Rube Goldberg machines atop one another until their short-term memory becomes the only private key that can decode them. Given about 30 minutes for the frescoes to "dry," this technique is proven secure even against rubber hose attacks. For maximum frustration, Max/MSP has objects which let the user hook Rube Goldberg machines up to a DSP graph, and vice versa. And I mean maximum frustration: while such inter-diagram connections give users functionality they wouldn't otherwise have, they also give users the false-confidence necessary to schedule a performance that ends up with that user staring at a silent laptop and muttering, "I don't understand, this worked fine on Tuesday." Edit: clarification
- spacechild1 7y ago
  How much of your critique of Max/MSP does apply to Pd? ;-)
- miillkk 7y ago
  I teach Max at a college level currently. The Rube Goldberg machines you speak of result from over engineering and the weird philosophy Cycling 74 has of always having new versions of Max be backwards compatible. However after you spend a good amount of time you start to be able to avoid these higher-level over engineered mini libraries and be able to use lower level operators to achieve exactly what you want and nothing more. After you build up your own library of modules all is well. But I do agree with your point. I've even been creating my own counters lately because even simple things like the counter "object" in Max are so bloated.
Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
Opcode did so much great stuff: their sequencer Vision was so much more immediate and intuitive than anything else I ever tried. It was a tragedy when Gibson bought and gutted them.
pmoriarty 7y ago
I have a real problem with visual languages like Max and PureData (and all the other visual languages I've ever seen). They seem like a good idea, and might be fine for computer-phobic people just starting to be introduced to programming, but whenever one tries to make anything even a little complex in them they inevitably become a mess of spaghetti-code. Languages like these also don't have the almost hundred years of research and effort in to creating an ecosystem around them like text-based languages do. There's no way to grep, diff or sed the source while remaining on the visual level. There's no way to harness the incredible power of text editors like vim or emacs. When there are lots of connections, determining what's going where becomes difficult to determine, though at least they do have some modularity. Debugging and tracing facilities tend to be minimal to non-existent. There are no static analysis tools, refactoring tools, fuzzing tools, unit-testing tools, or behavior-driven testing tools, no way to design by contract. These things are in their own little backwater. They look cool, and are easy to start with, but that's about it.
- qmmmur 7y ago
  These are valid criticisms (although parsing max patches is very easy as they are just json files). However, I think you're missing the point. The point of Max is to be one notch away from something like Ableton - a language and methodology for programming your own routines, patterns and at the lowesr level DSP algorithms (something that gen~ has facilitated nicely). You might even write your own objects in c++ if the need for functionality grows. I'd say I'm an expert in Max having spent considerable time in it developing applications and doing research and the trade off of not having those 'traditional' software engineering and computing tools is that you can work in an incredibly dirty and ad hoc way. At the end of the day it's a tool designed with creative goals in mind and the idea of unit testing, deploying, etc etc are not paramount to people's practice mostly. They just want to develop ideas fast in fairly stable real-time environment.
  - jcelerier 7y ago
    > The point of Max is to be one notch away from something like Ableton ahaha, when you think that Ableton was born from Max :)
pier25 7y ago
Also check out GEN which was recently added to Max. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDYs2UZzhI4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDYs2UZzhI4 It's a low level DSP engine that is already used in Ableton Live and embedded systems for modular synths.
- qmmmur 7y ago
  I absolutely love gen~. Graham Wakefield's software is all super interesting. His research centre at UoY is also very curious.
sideb0ard 7y ago
If you're in SF in march and interested in Max/MSP, my conf/music festival, Algorithmic Art Assembly, has a workshop on Creating Digital Instruments with Max/MSP - https://aaassembly.org/workshops/ https://aaassembly.org/workshops/ (conf also features Miller Puckette, Curtis Roads and many more!)
- suyash 7y ago
  That's neat, I live in SF and would love to submit my proposal for this event on AI & Music possible?
techbio 7y ago
Anyone familiar with music design languages—-how do this and others mentioned in comments (supercollider, puredata) compare with Ruby/midi based sonic-pi?
H1Supreme 7y ago
I've been using MaxMsp for a few years now, and I've been writing software for much longer. When I'm using Max (for audio and midi), it does not strike me as a "visual programming language", nor do I feel like I'm writing software. It strikes me as a modular environment like Reaktor or VCV rack, but one step closer to the "metal". And in that space, I think it works wonders. I initially got into Max because I had a lot of ideas for midi sequencing that I couldn't execute with more traditional tools. Initially I tried writing it by hand in C++ (which I did to an extent), but it became tiresome. Max was a breath of fresh air. I was building sequencers, clock dividers, sequential switches, and all types of bespoke tools very quickly. A background in software definitely helped, but it was still a quick learn. Additionally, I can sync with DAW's, grab data off of IAC busses, and map controls to Midi controllers very easily. All things I'm happy to not concentrate on while being creative. I don't have as much experience with the MSP (audio) side, but I have built some loopers and granular inspired patches.
JoeDaDude 7y ago
For those interested in learning formally, there is an online course in Max/MSP available through the Kadenze online school: https://www.kadenze.com/courses/programming-max-structuring-interactive-software-for-digital-arts-i/info https://www.kadenze.com/courses/programming-max-structuring-...

128 points by zaiste 7y ago

_def 7y ago

I don't know if you can use this with the Max standalone version, but here are plenty of devices for Max4Live (Ableton Live's integrated version of Max): https://maxforlive.com/ https://maxforlive.com/

raptorraver 7y ago

Opensource alternative Pure Data is also worth mentioning: https://puredata.info/ https://puredata.info/

bloogsy 7y ago
Seconding this: PureData is very good - used it throughout my second and third years of university to create soundscapes and scores. A little DSP knowledge is required to get really good, but very rewarding once you get the hang of it. Designing Sound by Andy Farnell is a great book to learn about ~PD and sound design in general: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Designing-Sound-Press-Andy-Farnell/dp/0262014416 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Designing-Sound-Press-Andy-Farnell/...
wwweston 7y ago
With puredata, is it convenient to either: * write/script your own "objects"/nodes in some conventional programming language * abstract a "patch" into its own node (thus writing a node in pd itself)
- spacechild1 7y ago
  * there are various extensions for embedding python or lua. For the latter, checkout pdlua or ofelia. * yes, they are called abstractions. They also have a nice feature called “graph on parent“, where part of the abstraction's canvas will appear on the parent canvas.
  - wwweston 7y ago
    Excellent, thank you!
strbean 7y ago
There was a cool web implementation back in the day... https://github.com/sebpiq/WebPd https://github.com/sebpiq/WebPd Looks like the creator is gearing up to pump new life into the project (as of 11 days ago!). In the issue linked at the top of the README, he bemoans the fact that he hasn't really had any other contributors. If anyone is looking for an interesting project...
- jancsika 7y ago
  If I had to guess, big blockers would be: 1. webpd doesn't have a GUI editor, so you cannot leverage the browser to prototype new ideas (or edit old ones). With that ability webpd would be like a codepen for audio and therefore garner a lot more interest. 2. Pd's gui logic mostly happens inside the audio engine which is coded in C. It's a huge hairball of code that's a pain to work with. 3. Pd's GUI paridigm is having multiple toplevel windows like the old Gimp interface. That's a pain to use in Pd, but it's especially a pain to try porting that to a browser. An HTML5 editor/display needs to be much less complicated than motif in a Linux window manager. I've been thinking about doing parallel work on a single-app style interface for Purr Data and shipping it with a feature flag. (Parallel as in not upsetting the current UI.) There has been some interest in such a project for GSoC, but it's a beast of a project with lots of little pain points and detail work to get it right.
- strbean 7y ago
  Oof, how does this comment garner a drive-by downvote?

skybrian 7y ago

I've used PureData a bit and found the UI rather minimalist. VCV Rack has a UI that's considerably more fun, but from a programming perspective, most modules are quirky rather than orthogonal and general-purpose. How does Max compare?

gmueckl 7y ago
VCV Rack is firmly in the Eurorack tradition, which has an enormous amount of deliberate quirkiness to inspire experimentation and new sounds. Max is pretty a graphical programming language with a focus on signal processing, but a scope that goes considerably beyond that.
stephencanon 7y ago
Max and ~pd are roughly equivalent from a programming perspective. They have different ecosystems though, with a lot of overlap, but also with a bunch of differences.

jcelerier 7y ago

If anyone's interested - I'm working on ossia score (https://ossia.io https://ossia.io ; https://github.com/OSSIA/score https://github.com/OSSIA/score) which is a bit like Max & PD, but the dataflow is integrated directly in the timeline which allows for better expressibility of evolution of time in the artwork.

billfruit 7y ago

Does it do rhythm heavy scores with regular drum beats etc?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jm547ster 7y ago
It can, however you’ll have to build your own sequencers or find other people’s work to cobble together

tayistay 7y ago

Max and Pd are interesting languages. Quoting the original designer, Miller Puckette [0]: "The design of Max breaks many of the rules of computer science orthodoxy, sometimes for reasons of practicality and sometimes of style." Audio and control signals are both represented in the same canvas, but with substantially different semantics. Audio signals are roughly what you might expect if you are familiar with analog audio processing: plug one box into the next, and data is constantly flowing. The control signals are actually messages (think MIDI), and can have some counterintuitive semantics. For example: if a single message is sent to two different objects, then those two objects send a message to a third (diamond shape), the third object will be executed twice, despite all of this happening in the same logical time-step. Execution order also depends on the position of the objects in the canvas, IIRC. The semantics are at least partially historical, because when Max was originally developed, real-time DSP wasn't available. [0]: http://msp.ucsd.edu/Publications/dartmouth-reprint.dir/ http://msp.ucsd.edu/Publications/dartmouth-reprint.dir/

jancsika 7y ago
> For example: if a single message is sent to two different objects, then those two objects send a message to a third (diamond shape), the third object will be executed twice, despite all of this happening in the same logical time-step. That's not an accurate description of the language's semantics. For example-- is the third object a unary or binary operator? Also-- for a unary object in a proper flow-based language, what happens if that third object is a unary operator like `sin`? I think the language/frontend cannot let you make the connection because it doesn't make any sense (or you'd end up implicitly overwriting one of the values/vectors). In a Max control chain you do get two outputs from two incoming connections to a unary operator. But then perhaps the programmer wanted to collect those two values into a two-item list and trigger that further down the chain. If they practiced "Fresco-based write protection" as they were trained, the diagram is encoded as spaghetti and we can never know for sure. :)
- qmmmur 7y ago
  I mean, this kind of comment really only comes from someone who has never used the language in any kind of depth. Whether or not the object triggers twice depends on type of object as you pointed out, ordering of inputs forgetting whether or not two executions is perhaps intended.

jancsika 7y ago

Max is Max/MSP, where: * MSP is an engine for generating/synthesizing/analyzing realtime audio which the user builds as a diagram in a GUI. The backend automatically sorts the diagram into a graph and generates the audio as the user builds the program. So by the end, the programmer has used their ears to measure whether the program can indeed compute audio for the diagram in realtime. (And the corresponding classes for signal computation are designed with soft realtime scheduling in mind.) * Max is a general purpose programming language where the user creates and connects various branches of different Rube Goldberg machines together in a GUI. This appears superficially similar to DSP diagrams above. But each object in the chain can do anything from simple realtime appropriate math to doing file i/o while allocating large chunks of memory. There's no easy way to tell which of these Rube Goldberg objects are realtime safe. Plus one can iterate infinitely and recurse into already recursive chains of calls with ease. (The MSP engine prohibits recursion.) Due to lack of constant aural feedback for Max diagrams, users typically keep a separate, erroneous mental model of all the Rube Goldberg machines in their short-term memory. In fact, most users practice a novel form of cryptography I call "Fresco-based write protection": the user keeps drawing and connecting more Rube Goldberg machines atop one another until their short-term memory becomes the only private key that can decode them. Given about 30 minutes for the frescoes to "dry," this technique is proven secure even against rubber hose attacks. For maximum frustration, Max/MSP has objects which let the user hook Rube Goldberg machines up to a DSP graph, and vice versa. And I mean maximum frustration: while such inter-diagram connections give users functionality they wouldn't otherwise have, they also give users the false-confidence necessary to schedule a performance that ends up with that user staring at a silent laptop and muttering, "I don't understand, this worked fine on Tuesday." Edit: clarification

spacechild1 7y ago
How much of your critique of Max/MSP does apply to Pd? ;-)
miillkk 7y ago
I teach Max at a college level currently. The Rube Goldberg machines you speak of result from over engineering and the weird philosophy Cycling 74 has of always having new versions of Max be backwards compatible. However after you spend a good amount of time you start to be able to avoid these higher-level over engineered mini libraries and be able to use lower level operators to achieve exactly what you want and nothing more. After you build up your own library of modules all is well. But I do agree with your point. I've even been creating my own counters lately because even simple things like the counter "object" in Max are so bloated.

Doctor_Fegg 7y ago

Opcode did so much great stuff: their sequencer Vision was so much more immediate and intuitive than anything else I ever tried. It was a tragedy when Gibson bought and gutted them.

pmoriarty 7y ago

I have a real problem with visual languages like Max and PureData (and all the other visual languages I've ever seen). They seem like a good idea, and might be fine for computer-phobic people just starting to be introduced to programming, but whenever one tries to make anything even a little complex in them they inevitably become a mess of spaghetti-code. Languages like these also don't have the almost hundred years of research and effort in to creating an ecosystem around them like text-based languages do. There's no way to grep, diff or sed the source while remaining on the visual level. There's no way to harness the incredible power of text editors like vim or emacs. When there are lots of connections, determining what's going where becomes difficult to determine, though at least they do have some modularity. Debugging and tracing facilities tend to be minimal to non-existent. There are no static analysis tools, refactoring tools, fuzzing tools, unit-testing tools, or behavior-driven testing tools, no way to design by contract. These things are in their own little backwater. They look cool, and are easy to start with, but that's about it.

qmmmur 7y ago
These are valid criticisms (although parsing max patches is very easy as they are just json files). However, I think you're missing the point. The point of Max is to be one notch away from something like Ableton - a language and methodology for programming your own routines, patterns and at the lowesr level DSP algorithms (something that gen~ has facilitated nicely). You might even write your own objects in c++ if the need for functionality grows. I'd say I'm an expert in Max having spent considerable time in it developing applications and doing research and the trade off of not having those 'traditional' software engineering and computing tools is that you can work in an incredibly dirty and ad hoc way. At the end of the day it's a tool designed with creative goals in mind and the idea of unit testing, deploying, etc etc are not paramount to people's practice mostly. They just want to develop ideas fast in fairly stable real-time environment.
- jcelerier 7y ago
  > The point of Max is to be one notch away from something like Ableton ahaha, when you think that Ableton was born from Max :)

pier25 7y ago

Also check out GEN which was recently added to Max. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDYs2UZzhI4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDYs2UZzhI4 It's a low level DSP engine that is already used in Ableton Live and embedded systems for modular synths.

qmmmur 7y ago
I absolutely love gen~. Graham Wakefield's software is all super interesting. His research centre at UoY is also very curious.

sideb0ard 7y ago

If you're in SF in march and interested in Max/MSP, my conf/music festival, Algorithmic Art Assembly, has a workshop on Creating Digital Instruments with Max/MSP - https://aaassembly.org/workshops/ https://aaassembly.org/workshops/ (conf also features Miller Puckette, Curtis Roads and many more!)

suyash 7y ago
That's neat, I live in SF and would love to submit my proposal for this event on AI & Music possible?

techbio 7y ago

Anyone familiar with music design languages—-how do this and others mentioned in comments (supercollider, puredata) compare with Ruby/midi based sonic-pi?

H1Supreme 7y ago

I've been using MaxMsp for a few years now, and I've been writing software for much longer. When I'm using Max (for audio and midi), it does not strike me as a "visual programming language", nor do I feel like I'm writing software. It strikes me as a modular environment like Reaktor or VCV rack, but one step closer to the "metal". And in that space, I think it works wonders. I initially got into Max because I had a lot of ideas for midi sequencing that I couldn't execute with more traditional tools. Initially I tried writing it by hand in C++ (which I did to an extent), but it became tiresome. Max was a breath of fresh air. I was building sequencers, clock dividers, sequential switches, and all types of bespoke tools very quickly. A background in software definitely helped, but it was still a quick learn. Additionally, I can sync with DAW's, grab data off of IAC busses, and map controls to Midi controllers very easily. All things I'm happy to not concentrate on while being creative. I don't have as much experience with the MSP (audio) side, but I have built some loopers and granular inspired patches.

JoeDaDude 7y ago

For those interested in learning formally, there is an online course in Max/MSP available through the Kadenze online school: https://www.kadenze.com/courses/programming-max-structuring-interactive-software-for-digital-arts-i/info https://www.kadenze.com/courses/programming-max-structuring-...