Workshop Max/Msp/Jitter

“Max is a graphical music programming environment for people who have hit the limits of
the usual sequencer and voicing programs for MIDI equipment.”
—Miller Puckette, Max reference manual, 1988

Max was conceived in 1986 as a project for producing interactive music at IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et de Coördination Acoustique/Musique) in Paris. The original author was Miller Puckette. Max became a commercial product from Opcode Systems in 1991 with further development by Puckette and David Zicarelli. Cycling ’74 became the publisher of Max in 2000. Since that time, Max expanded to include audio data (with the introduction of MSP) and image/matrix data (with the introduction of Jitter).
Max lets you control your equipment in any way you want. You can create applications for composing, improvising, and ordering or modifying media—anything you can imagine doing with a computer. Because Max turns all control information into a simple stream of numbers, you can “patch” anything to anything else.

Max provides you with a high level, graphical programming language. Programs are “written” using graphical objects rather than text. This reduces the need to learn a lot of arcane commands and syntax, and it provides a clear and intuitive way to write programs simply by connecting objects to each other.

Max takes care of all the low level programming tasks for you. It will trigger events at any arbitrary time in the future, interface to MIDI and other communication protocols, and perform useful logical operations.

Applications made with Max run in real time. Because of its speed, Max enables you to write programs that generate music instantly based on what you play, or that modify your performance as you play.

Max is based on the C programming language. Max provides a simple yet versatile, high level, graphical language which is itself written in C, but will be easy to use for those familiar with almost any other programming language, or even for those who have never programmed before. For those who are fluent in the C language, however, Max can be combined with C code that you write. So, if there’s something you need to do that Max can’t do—and Max can do a lot—you can write your own Max objects in C. The release of Max 4.5 further extends Max’s capabilities by supporting Java and Javascript.