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.