The patch pictured above was my performance patch for the Music Without Walls conference at DeMontfort University in the U.K. The conference occurred within a month of the release of Max 4.0 in the Spring of 2001, and I zealously dug deep into Max 4.0 to exploit some of its features. The conference paper, demo, and performance was another KromoZone performance – this time with Stephan Moore, Scott Smallwood, and myself making the lineup.

The patch was developed during a week of preparation with Stephan and Skot in Troy, NY (RPI). During the time I was there, Curtis Bahn basically got me hooked on the bpatcher object. I had previously known about it, but never quite trusted it for whatever reason. I quickly became addicted to it as it made the structure of my patch much cleaner and easier to conceptualize.

In this patch I used a coll object for all initialization, an idea taken from Todd Winkler’s book about Max. There was no event script or qlist because all parameters were controlled in real time by a Peavey fader box, foot pedals, and a fiddle~ object. The paradigm was that the patch was to extend my trombone into a sort of meta-trombone. The catch was all three of our computers were also controlling each other’s computers in a wierd interconnected way over a local network.

Our best performance was not actually at the conference, but in the studios of WRPI – the radio station at which Stephan worked in Troy. A photo from that performance, showing the patch, is below. Scott Smallwood is also in the picture.

This was the first patch where I was clearly separating the interface from the dsp algorithm. Inside any of the modules was a separate abstraction with the actual dsp processor. This could be turned on and off with the big toggle that you see in the interface for each module. At the time this still used the same pcontrol method that I had developed for Dark Forest.