Recap: Sept. 2nd Overlap Salon

The last Overlap Salon, hosted by the Berkeley Center for New Media, was a resounding success. We had a fantastic turnout during this East Bay edition of the Overlap Salon, and plan to hold more bold, cutting-edge, innovative synergies of new media social networking 3.0 there in the future.

Both beginning and experienced Max users attended (actually the largest concentration of experienced Maxers I’ve seen in the Bay since Expo ‘74), and our presentations did a good job of catering to all experience levels. Salon co-organizer Vlad Spears presented his new patch Wyvern, which uses the Monome and number patterns to sequence complex melodies. We discussed a lot of different data input and sequencing possibilities, including Numbers Stations.

Your humble author followed up with a run though of the poly~ object in Max. We started out with a very brief Max explanation for new users, which is the type of beginners educational content that we plan to be making a formal part of every Salon as we continue. After pulling everyone out of the wood of worldliness, I went through several patches showing both traditional uses of poly~ (to manage synthesizer polyphony) and less common ones such as filling arrays of audio and video buffers and changing out modular patches during runtime.

Poly~ Example Patches are the patches I showed at the event, consisting of some cleaned standard Max examples and a dynamic buffer patch.

After, we had an update on some new externals using Bonjour networking that are being developed by veteran Salon presenter Matt Ridenour. One of our ongoing projects at the Salon is to create a kind of performance framework where data and audio can easily be shared among several performers to create an ad-hoc Overlap Orchestra. In upcoming meetings we will be exploring this concept more, and encourage anyone interested to come share their ideas.

We look forward to our Salon next month, which we are planning to be an off the hook Max/Live explosion. Stay tuned to Overlap.org to get details on the event.

See more pictures from the last Salon on our Flickr page.