Thinking Back to Music Technology

            After posting about the EAMIR project, I couldn’t help but think back to my experience in Music Technology class.  Almost all of the teaching apps available through EAMIR were created using a program known as Max/MSP/Jitter (which are the three programming languages).  We spent a majority of the second half of the semester focusing on Max.  I found the program and its capabilities to be captivating.  It is rather user friendly and relies heavily on MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) data.  For my final project, I chose to work with Max to develop an interactive begin trumpet method book.

            The early pages of the book cover the basics of holding the instrument and producing sound.  One of the fundamental aspect of producing sound on the trumpet is setting up your embouchure (the muscles around your mouth).  In order to demonstrate this, I made a patch that corresponded to a page in the book about the way your lips should look before playing the trumpet.  This consisted of a series of (rather silly) pictures of me demonstrating the wrong and right ways to accomplish this next to a live webcam stream of the student so that they can compare.  The second patch I made is called “Instant Accompaniment.”  As the name suggests, it provides the student with a basic accompaniment to practice along with.  The accompaniment is limit to drum tracks but student have the options of Latin, Rock, or Hip Hop in three different tempos.  It was fun and rewarding to use Max to create a resource I can utilize in the future.