Max Month 4~ish

[Kenneth Harte]

Sample Accurate timing and Latency

This month I have mostly been making drum machines. I started off making a counter driven sequencer but the timing was pretty sloppy even with overdrive on I could feel the sloppyness and if my laptop started doing some background processes then my MIDI timing would suffer. Not too much but enough to be a distraction.

I had a look around at a few externals out there and decide try out Eric Lyons Sample Accurate Multiple Metrone (samm~). The timing is now completely sample accurate I can have bpms well into the thousands and not notice any lag or timing inconsitency. The timing is perfect but the patch throws up other problems. So far I cannot work out a way to include swing or shuffle into the patch. So it the timing is perfect if a little straight for my tastes.

My touchscreen overlay arrived. I removed front cover from a 15" flatscreen monitors a placed the touchscreen overlay on top and housed both in a wooden case. I now have a very tasty(and cheap) single touch touchscreen. I designed the interface for the drummachine to be very touch. Nice big switches and sliders and pretty colours. Also included are 2 FX with XY pads. A reverb and a tape delay with a good few slider/button controls and then the most performance orientated parameters are controlled by the XY pads. So far it's very enjoyable to use.

I got my camera (a logictech 9000) and while it is good for chatting to my brother on skype it suffers from latency. Probably not enough to hinder a conversation but diffinetly enough to cause problems if I want to track motion or to trigger events based on a dancers location. The lag is approx 25ms. This is very noticable timing problem when dealing with motion and sound. I'm not sure what to do about it. Appearently a firewire camera will cut down on the latency but I do not have the cash so I'm going to have to work something else out.

Next week I will get to play with some I-Cube X sensors. They have very useful sensors for physical computing. Push, bend, proximity sensors. At the minute I am trying to figure out what I can do and what I am not ready for yet. Once I understand the technologies in more context I will start working on a small scale with dancers. The dancers themselves are very eager to get involved with new technology and anything that can extend the physical expression to other sense I think is greatly appreciated by them.

Well this time next month I'll have finished my first gig in Max and should have done some work with the dancers. So till then :)

Ken