The "sound" of max/msp

[Gregory Taylor <gtaylor@xxxxxxxx>]

Seeing as I, like my friend jhno, have a sort of
vested interest in the matter, I tend to buttonhole about
everyone who voices this opinion. Of course, this
means that what I'm about to say is anecdotal, so
you should take it with a grain of salt.

When asked about why Max/MSP "sounds" the
way it does, the person who tells me this quite often
winds up talking about their really liking the "sound"
of something else [reverse-engineered filters in some
company's plug-ins come to mind here]. As often as
not, said discussion will sometimes end with "Why
don't you make a Max object that sounds like that
Altivec reverb plug-in that MOTU has? Then you
wouldn't sound like Max/MSP." This line of inquiry
often winds up as something like "I want to be able
to do what I do in Max/MSP, but want the *sound*
of some other commercial software." You'd be amazed
at how common this response is, once you hear this
anc actually *ask* the next questions about a hundred
or so times.

In some cases, a discussion of the "sound" of Max/MSP
will consist of the person to whom I'm talking either not
knowing that say, X, *is* done with Max, or making their
point by presenting me with a list of 3 artists who all
"sound" the same because they're largely doing the same
things (and probably not diverging a great deal from
Nobuyasu Sakonda's granulation patches. Man, if
everyone I've seen who's looted that MSP patch sent
Nobu $5, the guy could retire), with only a few little
idiosyncratic tweaks thrown in. The matter then morphs
into a discussion of why so many people are either using
a given technique, or why the level of divergence from
either help files or someone else's patches is so small.
Heck, I work that way, so I have no shame in pointing
it out.

A slight variation of this involves someone telling me
about a "unique" sound using our software which, upon
investigation, turns out to be a standard MSP patch
run through a plug-in or group of 'em hosted by the
vst~ object [I guess the GRM tools are as good an
example as any, and I confess that I probably agree
with the earlier poster who pointed out how much
academic electroacoustic music bears the sonic signature
of those tools]. Said investigatory discussion then turns
into a variation of the first line of inquiry listed above.

I suppose, too, that it goes without saying that only a
small number of Max/MSP users actually respond to
it's perceived limitations by going the extensibility
route and actually writing their own externals. If my
experience with, say, Dan Trueman and Luke DuBois'
PeRColate package of objects is anything to go by,
that is certainly *one* way to nicely circumvent the
MSP "sound." It's quite possible that there are a higher
percentage of such folks in academia and places like
IRCAM or CNMAT who "roll their own," and that
the entry of Max/MSP as a tool into wider sphere of
activity [i.e. non-academic] fields means that a smaller
percentage of people actually are engaged in that; But,
since there are really interesting objects out there being
written by the decidedly non-academic [jhno hisself,
for one], the percentages don't interest me much.

Here in my recordings pile, I've got a number of Max/MSP
based recordings: jhno's "Membrane," some Kim Cascone,
David Stevens' resonant structures made from bowed metal,
Dan Trueman and Curtis Bahn's free improv duo, the new
Autechre [What? nobody's ripping off what sounds to my
ears like Sean and Rob using spline curves to control rhythmic
structures? What a pity.], Cort Lippe and Zack Settl, Carl
Stone, and the Freight Elevator Quartet. As a personal
matter, I am hard pressed to identify a "sound" there.

Sorry if this goes on a little long. It's just that I've been
hearing something like this for a while, and have made
something of a hobby of actually collecting these opinions
and interrogating their holders at some infomal length.
What I've said here is entirely personal and anecdotal;
in some measure, I've found the answers to the followup
questions after that initial statement of opinion to be a
bit more interesting than the original opinion. Your
mileage may vary.

gregory
_
knowledge is not enough/science is not enough/
love is dreaming/this equation/Gregory Taylor/
WORT-FM 89.9/Madison, WI/ http://www.rtqe.net/