CC2 - Week 4 - MIDI Information and Control

First and foremost, a big shout out to John "I <3 Ubu" Delany for allowing me to pilfer his comprehensive ubumenu of MIDI instruments.

Time seems to be the most important ingredient in brewing a successful Max patch, followed closely by love and patience. CC2 this week was a deeper foray into MIDI control in Max, mainly pitch bend, modulation and program changing. I will never doubt the power of taking notes in class, as they pulled me out of a rut on more than one occasion, as did the right-click>help option. One specific problem I had was getting both MIDIin data and MIDIout data out of the midiinfo bidul... uh, box thingy. Notes to the rescue: left input created MIDIout, right input created MIDIin. Then again, this class note was only of limited use- "MIDI Panic button - Difficult". Nevertheless, Matt M and I figured out that 'flush' was the secret. I spent some time trying to figure out how to access program data, but luckily a flashback of the midiparse outputs helped me out- I think Luke showed me it some time ago, but I didn't know what I could use it for. Interesting quirk- when the patch loads, midiparse throws up 9 errors, then works anyway. If it ain't broke...

I have also obviously made visual upgrades to the patch, the main change being the context-sensitive colors of the pitch bend, modulation and others. Originally Luke and I discovered a program called 'mood_color' or something, which randomly changes colour values on an object. While this was nice and psychadelic, I instead ended up programming some of the dials on my keyboard to change colour depending on the value, which resulted in a sort of 'heating up' visual effect. The most complicated part of achieving this was for the pitch bend, as I wanted the colour to stay black while there is no bend, then fade to red for both bend up and bend down. There is an explanation of this inside the encapsulation "p Pitch Colouring" in the patch, and I have provided a pic below.

Big thanks to Dave D, Johnny D and Luke Dipants for regularly helping me out.



Patch File

1. Christian Haines. "Creative Computing: Semester 1, Week 4; MIDI Information and Control" Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 22nd March 2007.