Interview with the Creator of Max/MSP and Pure Data

Had the chance to meet Miller as he was part of my phd jury, as most of the time for persons of this caliber and with such a large impact, he was super nice and humble.<p>Regarding<p>&gt; There’s a problem in Max and in Pure Data, which is that you’re writing these things in terms of how they act. You’re making an instrument. But someone wants to store a score in the thing, and then do things that refer to objects in the score. So far, there’s no good design — or at least I haven’t seen a good design — that actually marries these two ideas in a single environment that works.<p>I&#x27;m working towards it in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ossia.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ossia.io</a> - the gist of the idea is to have a timeline with dataflow elements embedded directly into it so that parts of the score can connect to other parts which happen earlier &#x2F; after. This allows to easily make instruments that evolve in time... though most of its users use it to make scores instead of instruments.<p>(this leads to trying to answer the question &quot;what happens when two connected nodes of a dataflow graph execute for t=[0; 5seconds] for the source node, and t=[3; 7seconds] for the sink node&quot;).

This is a beautiful interview. I&#x27;ve been a Max&#x2F;MSP and Pd user for years and I&#x27;ve spent many hours swearing at the creator of both. Now that I feel that I know both the creator, and the mindset behind the programs a little better, I think I&#x27;ll spend less time swearing and more time discovering.<p>As an aside, Max4Live needs some serious love. It needs better interaction with the Live world than is currently provided by the LOM. Things like &quot;get the file path of the current Live set&quot; should be native, and there are a bunch of similar things that should be simple, but are impossible without horrible hacks. Now that Ableton own Cycling74 I hope this situation improves!

Host of said interview here!<p>I had a blast interviewing Miller, even though I now have nightmarish visions of imperative constructs rummaging around in my patches, and nasty text fields sneaking up behind my objects, haha.<p>For future interviews, I&#x27;m eager to find more women, NB, trans, etc. folks to bring on the show. If you know of anyone working on the frontiers of programming tools, HCI, PLT, program visualization, etc etc, I would love recommendations.<p>Cheers!

Funny to see this on the front page as I&#x27;ve just started implementing a Rust framework for writing Max&#x2F;MSP externals :)

Max&#x2F;MSP,PD, and to a lesser-extent Quartz composer were such inspirations for me in college. About 10 years ago i ended up putting together an app builder that leveraged similar concepts to PD&#x27;s &#x27;control&#x27; signals to drive UX interactions... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hIH5V2BMG_k" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hIH5V2BMG_k</a>

Max&#x2F;MSP opened so many cool doors for me back in the day when I was studying interaction design. The audio design students used it to rig up cool instruments and audio performances. I connected tons of sensors and controlled outputs over midi, to hardware or other software. It was so cool to put everything together in a visual interface.