I'm keeping this post short and sweet as I spent most of this first week studying the basics of MaxSP. I dove into the recommended Kadenze Programming Max course with Matt Wright, which is a lot more technical/lower level than the practical dives we've been doing in class. It feels helpful to have some idea of what's happening in the background, but I think I ended up spending too much time studying the logic over getting my hands on the tools... I'm not sure how much of the computer science stuff I need to know to make something useful, but I guess it can't hurt.
Still, I only got to scratch the surface on coding this week and I'm looking forward to diving deeper toward next week. The patcher is very simple, hacking together and altering some of the class examples and what I learned following along with the online course. I'm playing with cross-fade between a video playlist and my webcam, with hopes to use an external camera input in the future. I also linked the video playback with my keyboard using the ASCII translation equation, which is quite convenient. I can see how I'll be able to program different events according to QWERTY keys (and eventually external sensors) and that's all very exciting. Here's a little screen recording of my baby steps:
So as you can see from the patcher, there really isn't much going on yet. One buggy thing is that the video feeds aren't exactly cross-fading, but glitching between inputs. It's actually a cool accident and one I want to figure out how to replicate. I'm still wrapping my head around the order of operations, which was keeping the cam video from banging until I hit one of the QWERTY keys to start one of the videos in the playlist. I don't know what I changed to fix that part, but it's what led to the frame-jumping.
I'n any case, wrapping here and hoping I don't have to present today đ