ezdac~

The idea of “sample and hold” is to capture the amplitude of a signal at a particular instant in time, and hold it constant for a while. In MSP, the sah~ object allows you to do just that.

When sound waves are mixed together, be it mathematically within the computer or physically in the air, they “interfere” with each other.

Did you know that there are several different ways to turn MSP audio on and off in Max?

Max provides an object called gen~ that opens up a new patching window in which you can program audio at the sample level. You build an audio network inside the gen~ window with objects that are quite similar to MSP objects, but within the gen~ window there is only audio, no non-audio events.

The line~ object generates a signal that interpolates linearly from its current value to a new destination value in a specified amount of time. It receives messages specifying a new value and the amount of time (in milliseconds) in which to get there.

An oscillator is an electronic circuit that generates a cyclic (periodically repeating) signal.

Max can interface with other applications via ReWire. Max can act as either a ReWire host or a ReWire client. Max can be a client to an open host application just by choosing "ad_rewire" as the MSP audio driver in the DSP Status window. Alternatively, you can use Max as the host (mixer) application by including the rewire~ object in your program.

In signal processing, a "window" is a function (shape) that is nonzero for some period of time, and zero before and after that period. When multiplied by another signal, it produces an output of 0 except during the nonzero portion of the window, when it exposes the other signal. The simplest example is a rectangular window, which is 0, then briefly is 1, then reverts to 0. The windowed signal will be audible only when it is being multiplied by 1––i.e., during the time when the rectangular windowing occurs.

For this example to work correctly you will need to first download the pinger abstraction from the example "A beeping test sound" and save it with the filename "pinger.maxpat" somewhere in the Max file search path.

This patch shows a simple way to control the balance between two sounds, and also illustrates the relationship between a) mixing two sounds to one location and b) panning one sound to two locations.