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Looper's Delight
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I have been working on a Max/MSP implementation of my looping ideas for about seven years now. "Redefining the compositional language of looping" is a fair description of the motivation which keeps me dissatisfied with other tools. With all due humility, respect for and appreciation of diversity, I think that some of the stuff I have implemented with MSP goes quite a bit farther than most software, and all hardware, loopers. And yes, I am referring to the subset of "looping" that involves continuous live input and recording, presumably from an instrument or voice. My main concern is that too many people will join me in wishing I had more time to make this a sharable tool, rather than the private labor of love it remains. The issues of interface and feature set are not, at least for me, the hard part of using Max/MSP. Quite the opposite, the lack of constraint which the dedicated hardware development process imposes can encourage excessive dedication and refinement, sometimes at the expense of stability. That's a fancy way of saying it's hard to know when to stop building and start playing. Personally, I do my best to consider a given computer and OS and Max version as a fixed environment and use the hardware for that one thing only, but that's hard. Anyway, the looping tools I am working on include the following cool features: -variable speed playback of a loop, while recording into it. No glitches when the "playback head" passes the "record head". Even negative speeds (reverse playback) work. Interpolated resampling so arbitrary pitch shifts sound decent, not just half or double. This stuff can end up sounding like a longer version of the H3000 Reverse Shift algorithm, one of my favorite effects ever. -"live editing" features that support interactively defined and triggered loop segment playback, with amplitude envelopes and pitch control. Glitch-free, sample-accurate and of course all while continuing to record. I'm slowly developing a novel interface for visualizing segments, and in the meantime have a fun GUI game-demo where a "listener" triggers segments based on its "field of view" relative to the "loop planets" in its universe. Each loop has a parameter for its gravitational pull on the listener, and the listener has inertia. The closer the listener gets to a loop, the less it can see, so the segment gets shorter. But louder, since it's closer. So you end up with a sort of automatic "composition" of short, prominent snippets on top of a "background radiation" of longer quiet segments. And you can let the listener orbit and keep playing your instrument. -multiple synchronized loops, with multiple channels each. No guarantees (yet) of how many at once but I am a big fan of quad looping, and have run two long quad loops on an old G3 laptop. Ethernet can sync up multiple laptops. -all the usual feedback options, or at least the ones I wish were more usual, such as EQ and inserts on the feedback paths for VST plugins, and on the multichannel loops, matrix mixing so for example a quad loop can slowly spin around as it decays. Cross-feedback between loops for instant mush. -integration with hard-disk recording systems, so you can record all the ingredients as well as the soup, and have something like the History functions in Photoshop. (Got a ways to go with this). -Perhaps most importantly for a software looper, latency compensation. Even though current interfaces can support buffer sizes down to just a handful of samples, and the computers are fast enough to still do a lot of vector processing on the small vectors, my sucky rhythm needs all the help it can get, so I devised a way to play along in perfect sync with a loop. Latency is one of the usual complaints about general purpose computers in performance. I remember a paper at the 1985 AES Digital Audio Conference, that convincingly showed how 1 millisecond of slop is easily audible under certain circumstances (circumstances which do apply to looping). On the other hand, ADC and DAC chips in dedicated hardware take time, and DSP is DSP, pretty much, so I wonder how much latency there is in the hardware loopers. And then there's the speed of sound, let's not even go there...:-) There was another paper at that show that refreshingly admitted to promoting vaporware. That's perhaps what I am doing here, but the concepts and fundamentals of my work are pretty well established. I demonstrated most of them at UC Berkeley CNMAT's MSP Night School about three years ago, and can't resist countering Kim's suggestion that people using Max probably don't remain dedicated. My experience is quite the contrary; I've bought and sold tons of hardware in the pursuit of "truly cool" looping systems and Max has outlasted most of them. I suspect the main reason behind the perception that more people dabble in software than hardware is that it's easier to copy software. Geoff, I am not sure what kind of research you are doing, but let me know if it sounds like my personal work is of interest. One of these years I will start playing out again, I hope, and as soon as my 4-year old Producer allows it, I will try again to make a stable, sharable version of some of this stuff. thanks for the bandwidth, Alex S. At 6:35 PM -0800 2/9/03, Kim Flint wrote: >At 05:49 AM 2/6/2003, Geoff Smith wrote: >>Could anyone tell me what patches, live-loopers are using in MAX/MSP >>the only ones I have been able to find are percolate and fripp >>which both seem quite basic. >>Does one know where any truely cool looping patches are for Max/Msp???? >>I am trying to research how loopers are using new technology to redefine >the >>compositional language of looping, but I am coming up against a brick >wall >>as far as MAX/MSP use is concerned. >>Any help appreciated > >Personally I haven't really encountered many people doing real live >looping with Max/MSP. At best I've seen relatively primitive long >delay line type stuff, but nothing remotely like the type of >interactivity of hardware devices like the repeater/jamman/edp etc. >Another MSP application I remember somebody on the list developing >was called Procrastinator, but again it was just 4 delay lines in >parallel and not much else. > >Of course there is Radial, which is really more of a "live-remixing" >application aimed at looped playback, mixing, and filtering of >pre-existing samples. More like a phrase sampler that a looper. It's >pretty nice for that, but quite different from the sort of looping >most people here are interested in, where they are really creating >all the sounds in the loop on the fly and interacting with it in >real time as they play. > >If you come across anything else, please let us know. I suspect part >of the problem is that crafting the interface and feature set of >things like the edp or repeater takes years of effort and input from >dozens (or even hundreds) of users to really refine the ideas. It is >not easy at all. I imagine that most people working in Max/MSP don't >remain so dedicated to the projects they start, and lose interest >long before they get that far. > >kim > > >______________________________________________________________________ >Kim Flint | Looper's Delight >kflint@loopers-delight.com | http://www.loopers-delight.com