Create Digital Art with Max/MSP & Jitter

Did you ever have a vision in your head, maybe a dream or idea that you wanted to make into reality? Max/MSP is a graphical environment for music, audio, and multimedia. I can make virtually any interactive artistic work I can imagine with Max.

What have others created with Max? Virtual environments, unique instruments, synthesizers, effects for instruments, theramins, DJ interfaces, VJing applications, just to name a few.

Max/MSP is a wonderful way to get into programming. Instead of traditional line based code, Max/MSP was one of the first languages to offer a graphical method of coding. To use Max/MSP, I basically string objects together in a certain fashion to write the algorithm of the program. There is plenty of online documentation available on Cycling 74’s website.

What makes Max so powerful? It is Max’s ability to interface with almost any hardware controller, from MIDI to a Wii controller. I created an eye tracking headset for my Undergraduate Thesis and wrote a program in Max/Jitter than analyzed the incoming video signal from the camera on the headset and tracked the position of a pupil in the video frame.

You can download Max/MSP at Cycling74.com and try it for 30 days.