Hello Chris
Well, those are some very good points. But to be honest, as a player of theremins and other analogue instruments, I'm not a great fan of midi. I know it's an obvious thing to say - but I don't like my music quantised up into neat little pitch or temporal chunks. I enjoy all the sloppiness in between two disparate sounds - in my mind, that's a huge part of what makes the music I'm into seem interesting. And that's something I try to replicate with my automata and installations, at least some of the time.
Anyway, sorry if this is now veering off-topic but in my mind this seems relevant to the issue of how to deploy Max/MSP. Chris - I wonder if this chimes with what you were thinking:
Personally, I'd love to be able to hand over a complete, tangeable musical artefact to someone and say 'there you go - play this', rather than, 'there you go, plug this into an external Mac, PC or whatever and then you can start playing'. And I'd love to perform with such an artefact myself. I think it might be easier to encourage some non-techy musicians to work with such a device. It's closer to the old paradigm of a musical instrument as a stand-alone machine, with a limited range of functions, which has been designed, ergonomically, to enable the user to perform a certain expressive tasks (e.g. strumming at different intensities).
I also have a hunch that interactive artefacts seem more magical if we can at least half-convince the user that the actions aren't all down to computers. That's because computers are so familiar now. At the very least, I want to dump the screen and the big box that everything is connected to so people don't fix on the familiar. Of course I'm not savvy enough to make really interesting things that do ditch the computer entirely - and I really enjoy working with the functions that software like Max/MSP have to offer. So getting a small Max/MSP-capable computer, that I can embed in a tangeable artefact, incorporating physical sensors and actuators, is an attempt to have my cake and eat it.
In hiding the computer, I suppose I'm stepping into the realms of deception here - but then I've been talking quite a bit to magicians recently and have come to realise a little bit of deception and/or misdirection can be a wonderful thing. I made a creepy little Max/MSP controlled puppet show recently where I (semi) hid the computer. The strangest and most satisfying thing was how curious people of all ages were about 'who was working it'. The kids would look up and see if they could see some people hidden in the box. You don't get that so much when users interact with sounds and graphics, delivered on a computer, even if they are far more sophisticated.
...anyway, I realise that none of these ideas are new. But I suppose I was hoping that recent advances in miniature computers might enable me to have my little go at reinventing the wheel. I completely take your point though that it's a big hit on the wallet, just to make a one-off machine!
Best wishes
Sarah
(Spacedog UK)
