"The best music software the world has ever seen"

From: mclaren
To: Practical microtonality group
Subject: Miller Puckette allegedly writes "the best best
music software the world has ever seen"

Your Humble E-Mail Correspondent happens to own a fully
legit copy of MAX. It's the old version, the really old
version, that runs of 68XXX Macs. It runs fine on my
Powerbook 180.
"Fine" means it works the way it's supposed to. MAX
is a disaster as music software for many reasons. The
way it's supposed to work violently contradicts most
of the ways a reasonable composer's mind works, both
in my experience and in that of many other MAX users.
Let's start at the beginning:
MAX is badly misconceived at its most basic level.
The idea of making music by wiring together various
virtual modules is a disaastrous for several reason. First,
because of the patch-cord jungle effect. In a typical MAX
patch you quickly gets virtual wires going from everywhere
to everywhere else to the point where it becomes impossible
to figure what the bloody hell is going on. Cause and effect
rapidly becomes lost. A flow chart become impossible to
visual. The whole thing makes your head ache. It makes
your teeth hurt. Your eyes pulsate like jellied napalm
just looking at the whole criss-crossing spiderweb mess.
So you encapsulate that spiderweb mess in another
virtual container. Then you string virtual wires from
that virtual block to another virtual block. Soon the
same problem begins anew.
At the end of the day, you wind up with a set of neat
little virtual blocks which, when clicked upon to expand 'em,
turn into a Spaghetti From Hell. Not my idea of a good way
to visual a musical score. Nor (I would submit) any other
competent musician's.
The second problem is related, but slightly different. It
is the same problem suffered by Csound and MusicBox and
other similar computer composition/timbral specification
langauges or systems. (MAX is a graphical language of sorts.)
This problem involves bogging down in the minutia.
There is no way, to my knowledge, in MAX to do something
as simple as stop at rehearsal mark C and go back and pick up
from rehearsal mark B. Real musicians in the real world are
accustomed to doing this. MAX works at a micro-level, the ultra-
low level, the infra-atomic level of music.
To prove useful, real musical tools developed over the centuries
(like common practice musical scores) gracefully accomodate a full
range of musical hierarchies. As L. B.l Meyer has pointed out, music
is a hierarchical procedure in which the rules differ drastically
from one level of the hierarchy to another.
Let us take some specific concrete examples of MAX's gross
inadequacy -- which is to say, MAX's obsessive monomaniacal concern
ONLY with the infra-atomic micro-level of music.
Suppose you want to compose by doing what Lou Harrison sometimes
does -- namely, sketch out some high points and then draw an arc in
between those melodic points. MAX has no way of doing anything like
this. MAX has no way of shaping a phrase "ritardando," or spceifying
very strong-off-beat accents within one phrase as opposed to strong
on-the-beat accents within the next phrase.
MAX has none of these features because MAX concerns itself only
with things like "bangs" and "triggers." These are infra-atomic
musical levels of actions in which individual notes get stopped or
started, or blcoks of notes get stopped or started.
This misconceived anti-musical mindset, built into MAX at the
basic level, typically results in a standard "sound" in MAX MIDI
compositions. (There's a MAX DSP add-on but I won't speak to that
since I don't own it and haven't used it.)
A typical MAX composition is like the end of that kid's
game "Mousetrap." You take some action on a MIDI kbd or MIDI woodwind
controller or some other MIDI generator, and MAX spews out a rapid
blast of unpredictable notes. Then the MAX output settles down, then
another blast of stuff vomits out of MAX. This goes on and on until
the MAX program reaches its end or until the person operating MAX
clicks something to shut off the output.
It is true that MAX can take a sequence of MIDI notes as an
input and spit out depending on certain conditions. Again, this is
where MAX proves so grossly musically inadequate. MAX has no useful
way to *shaping* that MIDI sequence in a musical way. Ordinarily we
would want to bunch up notes as we play 'em faster -- a human does
this. It's very distinctive. A human playing the same passage fast on
a piano plays the notes with a very differentn timing and rhythmic
accent than the putatively same set of notes played slowly.
But no...MAX just vomits out the exact same MIDI sequence faster
or slower. This is so anti-musical that it makes musicians dizzy.
Computer geeks love it, of course, because of the object-oriented
real time tech. Musicians listen and their eyes start to pulsate
like jellied napalm and their teeth begin to hurt. It's the
classic "blind grinding of a robot's gears" syndrome. (Ivor Darreg's
memorable phrase.)
The last problem I would like to cite with MAX involves the
impossibility of understand a connection twixt cause and effect. Most
MAX users appear to use this to generate more or less random outputs.
I see it as a problem because when I build some MAX patch beyond a
minimal complexity, I have no goddamn idea what the hell will vomit
out of it.
Followers of the coin-flipping kook love this profoundly anti-
musical flaw built into MAX. Real musicians typically despise this
kind of thing, because it's not discernibly different from the
trumpet player doing a riff in measure 10 that they're not supposed
to do until measure 37, while the xylophonist is asleep, and the
piano player is chatting up a chick and doing a I-IV-V-I vamp instead
of broken dim 7th chords.
When the machine runs riot and starts vomiting out unpredictable
output, I lose interest. In fact my interest in a musical system
whose output cannot be adroitly controlled by the composer is
measured in micro-give-a-sh*ts. If the music is gonna sound like
crap, please let it be my fault -- not the machine's.
By destroying a clear sense of cause and effect with all those
cockamamey bangs and delay lines feeding back and around and inside
out on themselves, MAX becomes a glorified casino -- not a system for
composing music. If I want to go to a casino, I'll visit the Trump
Palace, thank you, not the concert hall.
---
Let me give you a really great example of music software which
IS truly mondo and awesome and killer cool -- SuperCollider, written
by James McCartney.
This language allows *both* large-scale compositional control
(courtesy of built in Smalltalk-like commands) *and* Csound-type
micro-level control of individual notes and timbral nuances blah blah
blah.
SuperCollider is the way music software *should* work. Jame
smCcartney is a friggin' genius. This is mondo killer stuff. Best of
all, it's now available as shareware.
MAX sucks by comparison with SuperCollider. MAX is a
programming geek's misconceived idea of music software. SuperCollider
is a musician's idea of music sofware.
--
How does this relate to microtonality?
SuperCollider allows you to build on the lowest to the highest
levels. It lets you sculpt the large-scale composition to fit the
tuning, it let's the fine-tune the timbres to fit the large-scale
structure.
MAX is a runaway tank on the freeway. It crushes other cars and
smashes into buildings, and whatever tuning you're in, tough tit
bubba -- what you get is what you get, and given the hypercomplexity
and countinetitive nature of the typical MAX patch, who knows what
that'll be?
I have not yet heard any micrtonal music composed using MAX
that sounded like anything worth a damn. It sounds like my neighbor's
dog rolling around on a piano keyboard.
Carter Scholz has done some killer compositions using
SuperCollider. They're all microotnal. Those some kickin' jams, homey.
If MAX is Miller Puckette's idea of how to do music, then
Milelr needs to put on a hawaiaan shirt, smoke some doobidge, take a
poop, and go out 'n get laid.
That white boy been starin' at that ole computah console too
long, bubba.
---------
--mclaren