I have recently decided to try to learn to program in an effort to incorporate other technologies with my music projects.  I currently use Max MSP Jitter to create most of my projects in conjunction with other end-user sound and visual programs (let me know if you’d like a post about these programs).  I hope that the incorporation of Flash with its Action Script 3 language will offering the following benefits:

  1. The ability to generate varying instances of visual objects at runtime (dynamically during the performance).  In Flash, I can create generative templates with varying degrees of random deviation that create objects (in this case, something akin to little cells) that each have slightly different looks, and ways of interacting.
  2. The ability to embed in browsers.  This cannot be overstated.  With Flash, my art projects can be viewed by the majority of computers without the need for a viewer to “download” anything (since the browser does this automatically) or install anything.  This means that people may actually look at it instead of passing it by from a bad interest to effort ratio.
  3. Related to browser embedding, I hope to eventually stream the sounds generated by max into Flash, using Max as a backend for generative sound production, and to
  4. Allow Flash users to manipulate the Max patch parameters using the Flash interface as a front end, with the ability to change the type of sounds generated, how they are assigned, to save presets of their preferences, and to record their versions to share with others.

This video was embedded using the YouTuber plugin by Roy Tanck. Adobe Flash Player is required to view the video.

Points 3 and 4 are to be done in a future project, and this introductory video will just scratch the surface talking about the connections, the translator I decided to use, and some other possible translators out there.

In this video, I talk about the flashserver (http://www.nullmedium.de/dev/flashserver/), which connects Open Sound Control (http://opensoundcontrol.org/) information from Max MSP Jitter to Adobe Flash using a combination of technologies (OSC sent via UDP from Max to Flash’s XML socket via TCP).

I also talk briefly about a few other alternatives that I did not use including Flosc (flash OSC  at http://benchun.net/flosc/), and the Make Controller’s mcHelper progrogram (http://www.makingthings.com/resources/downloads), which communicates from Max, Flash, and other programs to their hardware controller (which receives OSC messages) but does not (as far as I can tell and correct me if I’m wrong!) translate between programs, and that additionally requires the mcHelper program to be running in addition to your main program.  There are still other translator programs out there with a lot of promise like Oscar (http://www.todo.to.it/blog/oscar/), and probably more to follow.

I hope you enjoy this first video (despite it being dry and without video interest!) and will give me feedback that can help make future videos more worthwhile.