Looking Outwards-02

I wrote about a similar piece of art last week, but seeing that this week’s prompt was generative art, I knew I had to find another piece from this form/coding language. Max/MSP is a graphical language-slash-program primarily meant for creation with signal flow, whether that be control signals, audio, or video/image signals. It’s often used in conjunction with Ableton for live music generation as well. The piece that I found on youtube (linked below) is attempting to emulate a generative ambient patch on a Eurorack synth setup. Something that I find really interesting about a lot of computer-generated music or audio pieces is that so much of the technique is trying to emulate analog systems and pieces of equipment. Humans have been used to analog audio since broadcasting began, and even though digital audio techniques are much more efficient and often cheaper, we keep striving towards that analog quality and technique. Even the physical layout of the Max patch is reminiscent of a modular synth setup, and the program itself is designed with ‘patch cables’ as the method of connection between objects, or actions.