Working With MAX MSP

I am nearly finished with my new piece for string quartet which uses MAX MSP as an electronic assistant to guide a string quartet playing in 5-limit just intonation.

The patch uses a series of equations to create chords by modulation tetrominos (tetris bricks) around a structure called a tuning lattice: A wonderful graphic of this was created by Mannfishh. The patch takes these pitches and sends them to 4 pairs of headphones worn by each player of a string quartet, who then copy the pitch. The score does not show pitch but does give aleatoric improvisation instructions for each chord change. MAX allowed me to create this patch in a way that the performance will sound very different every time the piece is played, but the chords will alweays follow the same set of rules. I decided that using a patch to guide the players by ear would result in much less practice time then working out mathematically perfect tunings (think Ben Johnston String Quartets).

The patch came together pretty quick, although there were times when I wasn’t sure if certain things were possible, I eventually got everything to work consistently (besides a strange glitch that causes the patch to not set off a certain series of events, which I have yet to fix). I am very satisfied with how this piece turned out, and I look forward to continuing to experiment with MAX in my future works.