Max Innovation: An Interview with David Zicarelli

CCRMA Laptop Orchestra

I wanted to study computer music in graduate school and all six places I applied rejected me. Then I met Andy Schloss and David Jaffe who were at CCRMA at Stanford and they suggested I apply to a small program called Hearing and Speech Sciences and focus on auditory perception rather than music composition. That was excellent advice as I found I enjoyed studying psychology a lot more than music.

Opcode DX7 Editor/Librarian from 1986

So Chris, the fact that you even know to ask me this question, I think I should point out that you and I have known each other for a ridiculously long time and we met while we were both involved with Opcode Systems back in the mid 1980s. I met Dave Oppenheim who started Opcode, when he came to some kind of fair to show his brand new MIDI interface for the original Macintosh. That was probably early 1985. I was interested in using it to write software and he suggested I write an editor for the DX7 I had. Another good piece of advice. I learned a lot from that project.

Intelligent Music M

These were interactive composition programs I worked on after the DX7 Editor. They were inspired by the ideas of my teacher Joel Chadabe. M was a more direct reflection of Joel's concepts of compositional variables and was created with two other students of Joel's, John Offenhartz and Antony Widoff. Joel wanted users to be able to create and adjust aspects of their music while it is being composed by a computer algorithm. These days, this is just kind of the way everything works but at the time it was a pretty new idea.

Jam Factory circa 1987

Jam Factory performed a simple analysis of what you played into it and immediately started replaying a version of it back to you. I was interested in a certain kind of sound in which if you zoom out the music would sound vaguely the same but if you focused on the specific notes it wouldn't really be repeating. I haven't really ever gotten past that idea and it's still what I try to do all the time.

David Zicarelli
and Miller Puckett

After I had worked on some interactive composition programs for a few years, Miller asked me if I would be interested in "commercializing" Max with him. At the time, before there was the possibility of giving your software away by putting it on the Internet, the only way you could really get your ideas in front of people was putting your program on some floppy disks and selling it.

I don't know that I had a "vision" for Max but the first thing I thought would be good to do was to apply all the stuff I had learned working with Dave Oppenheim, like how to do accurate timing and high performance MIDI I/O. These things were not built into the operating system the way they are now. Music software inventors had to do super low-level programming to get these computers to perform at a level musicians would accept.

What I initially found cool about Max was that it recognizes a fundamental problem very specific to using computers creatively, which is that most of the ideas you have when you're working on art or music are actually lame and you need a way to discover that quickly so you can get to the ideas that are worthwhile. Max as an environment lets you explore creative ideas much more effectively than text-based programming — you can make changes in a second that would take half an hour in a text-based language. But many of the low-level building blocks that you need to do that are usually better created in text-based programs because the code will run faster and you can manage complexity better.

In the past 10 years my co-workers and I at Cycling '74 have been exploring something we call code generation that addresses both the performance problems and some of the low-level things you can only do with textual programming. You can make something that is graphical that looks like a Max patcher and the code generation translates that into actual C++ source code you can use for whatever purpose you want.

Nothing, except that my meetings start earlier in the morning because I live in California.

I think "using" Max is not just making software with it. You can be a user of Max by using MFL devices in your Live set. Or maybe I make the MFL device and then I use it in a Live set I am creating. If you do learn how to create stuff in Max, then anything you don't like about someone else's MFL device you could potentially change to work the way you prefer. I suppose one thing that's happened is that some people might have been influenced to think about their music from a process perspective, not just a content perspective.

Max for Live

The focus with MFL is the extension of the Live environment via creating audio effects or instruments. There are some restrictions in terms of newer features of Max such as Gen and MC that you can't edit in the MFL version. Another way to think about Max for Live is that it provides all the features of Live to users of Max; in other words it can be Live for Max. For example, you can apply automation to the stuff you do in Max, or leverage the Live mixer or all the stuff you can do with the warp engine. You could build a lot of that stuff in Max but why go to all the trouble?

There are so many amazing things I've seen with the software it's almost impossible to single anything out, but I will mention two of my favorite artists whose work is surprising.

First, Luke Dubois finds ways to make Max do things it should never do, like generate maps as PDF files and analyze large data sets. For example, he has a piece called A More Perfect Union where he generated maps of every state in the US where the name of the city is replaced by the most common word in online dating profiles for people who live in that city.

I am also a big fan of Katsuhiro Chiba's music — I simply have no idea how he manages to achieve such incredibly detailed timbres. And the visual interface of the Max patch he uses to perform is just as gorgeous and detailed as the music it produces.

If you think about music making in a larger sense than just what recordings people are releasing, then you could say that a lot of the devices people make with MFL can be as much artistic statements as practical tools. I think this has an impact on the people who use them, because Live is a place where people are trying things out, obsessively tweaking stuff. So when you are using Live, you are in a position to be influenced by these creative tools.

Robert Henke's Granulator would be an example for me. The sounds that device makes changed how I think about mixing and effects. You can use Granulator as a kind of "reverb" but it isn't really reverb at all. The other way Granulator influenced me was to think about this more abstract concept of reverb and how I might be able to make other tools that take this idea as a starting point.

I think about the music I make as building a system or process rather than a fixed recorded track. The two aspects of Max I use the most these days are the MPE support and MC. As a piano player I like how quickly I can be expressive with a single key and apply different parts of that performance to different parameters in my system simultaneously. It's like being able to turn five knobs at the same time but I can do it with one finger.

Read: David Zicarelli and Tom Hall at Ableton Loop

MC, which allows working with large numbers of audio channels, has completely changed how I work with making sounds in Max. I can quickly make complex sounds that would have otherwise required hours of tedious patching. Because it would have been so tedious to make those patches, I never would have tried making those sounds in the first place. That's always the thing I hope to achieve when working on the software — make an idea visible to someone that they would have never seen before.

When I used to show something created with Max to my kids, they would say, "Oh there's another one of Dad's weird friends." I like it that there are least a few tools out in the world that cater at least a little bit to people who aren't completely normal. I particularly think this is important in the context of education. I've heard so many stories of people who had a transformative experience learning Max. They may not even use the software any more, but Max caused some realization about what they were capable of doing. Every other subject in school didn't do that for them. I have no idea what happens in those cases.