Cycling '74 Expo Day 3
Ben Houge, began my day with a workshop on prototyping video-game music in Max/MSP. Ben has worked on some serious industry leading games having worked for Ubisoft and Sierra among others. The workshop walked through issues and benefits of looping and layering music before moving to a slick audio-engine example from the early stages of design in Ubisoft's EndWar. This patch had some amazingly simple processes: one such was gating a metronome pulse that could play a sound file at regular (or irregular) intervals. This created the illusion of a pulse. A second notable point about the patch was pooling different variations of guitar/drum/bass riffs that could be triggered in a random order to give a more acoustically genuine performance.
The first person to write something with Max, Philippe D Manoury, spoke about various portions of his work and how they blended with Max. Some really interesting spectral examples where processing of live instruments were directly effected by Max and where FX were triggered by the instruments for Max to respond to. Of particular note was his string quartet, which, at points, produced bell-like sounds through the software.
Daito Manabe, however, ruled the world when he entered and showed all the projects he'd used Max on. The audience were in hysterics on watching this and the other descriptive videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtRVvBSbonk&feature=relmfu
On reflection, my favourite things about the conference has been watching presenters patch live, thus letting us observe the thought processes and evolutions of patches as new features are imagined but I think the most amazing thing has been seeing how far this program can take projects and the infinite horizons that are available to its users.