The other highlight of my Cambridge trip was staying with some new friends from MIT's Media Lab, Cati Vaucelle and Adam Boulanger. Cati is a disarmingly beautiful yet razor sharp grad student in the Tangible Media Group and Adam is part of the Hyper instruments group and is the most low-key super genius I've ever met. They're both MaxMSP wizards already so it was great to be able to work on my beginner apps and get their help. I showed them both my old Guitar Games and Piano Games applications and they were very enthusiastic about my efforts. It was extremely encouraging for me to watch them try the games out and make very insightful comments about what they liked and what could be improved. One of the big problems I had when developing these applications is that I got very little feedback. My plan now is to create a web page where people can download my creations (free and open-sourced) and get involved in the improvement of games by testing the games, making suggestions for game ideas, and even reprogramming them!

After the workshop was over, I visited Cati and Adam's groups at the Media Lab. I had followed Cati's work from her blog but half of the time I was uncertain if her projects were just ideas or if they were actually real-life creations. Well, as you can tell from the group's name "Tangible Media" most of what Cati blogs about are real things. She demonstrated various "experiments" for me like perfume bottles that play music and her video editing system for children. Adam's lab was an amazing place as well. There I met Craig Lewiston who is creating a glove / keyboard system that helps teach piano by forcing your hand to play the piano with magnetic fields that at first repel your finger and then attract your finger down onto a key. I showed him Piano Games and I hope he can use the graphics from it in his project. Adam showed me some very advanced MaxMSP programs he created in which a P5 gaming glove could be used to generate lush sounds. These sounds were created by Csound, the book for which was written/edited by Adam's father Richard. The next day Adam gave us a Csound tutorial and now, in addition to MaxMSP, I have Csound to explore. The Csound book looks like it will be a great way for me to learn about synthesis techniques and effect processing.

I really didn't want to leave Cambridge, but I had a meeting with my publisher. Plus, fish and guests stink after three days... and it had already been six days!

I feel good. I just came back to New York City after a week in Cambridge in which I had a great time.

The MaxMSP/Jitter workshop was very useful, and I recommend it to anyone wanting to learn multimedia programming. It was taught by the energetic and knowledgable Gregory Taylor and the audience was a mix of programmers, musicians and installation artists. Greg surprised me by saying “you’re the one who wrote the Rails book!” – he had looked up each of students online to get a sense for his audience. Of course, I had to correct him in that I wrote “a” Rails book, not “the” Rails book, which could only be DHH’s book. Greg thought I might be too advanced a programmer for the class, but he accepted me anyway. I’m glad he did because I never did the kind of graphical programming that MaxMSP uses.

Plus, without this workshop I probably would have kept procrastinating and never worked through the tutorials. The first day and a half of lectures were excellent, but because MaxMSP can do MIDI, audio, and video, Greg’s attempts to cover it all led to a bit of a fractured presentation. To be fair, this was the first time he was doing a workshop that covered all three types of media at once (usually Jitter, the video component is a separate workshop). Anyway, the good news is that after a couple of years removed from doing my music game programming, I built my first new music trainer in MaxMSP. It’s a simple little application in which two notes play, one droning sound that is constant, and one that you control the pitch of using a Playstation type game pad. Once you make the two notes match, the drone note changes and the sequence repeats. I call the game “Tone Deaf” invaders and I think it’s a good exercise. As I get more experienced with MaxMSP I will make it more fun, more of a game. Details on that should follow in this blog, time permitting.

A long time ago, right in the thick of writing my book, I decided that in 2007 I would force myself to travel more, take classes, and basically get the heck out of the house much more often. So, I signed up for a MaxMSP workshop in Cambridge for February thinking “there’s no way I’ll still be working on the book in February!” Well, in a classic example of the task filling up the time allotted, I worked at a frenzied pace for the last few weeks finishing up up the remaining chapters of my book, “RailsSpace.” While not everything is done, and there will be more work like author reviews and accompanying web site creation later this year, it feels great to be turning all seventeen chapters.