This example is from my Algorithmic Composition blog, and is explained there.
This patch uses the table object to calculate a probablility distribution to make the short notes occur much more often than the long notes.
This example demonstrates how the settings of a resonant bandpass filter can be altered in a rhythmic way for musical effect. The three table objects each contain 16 numbers, which will be used as the parameter settings for gain, center frequency, and Q in a reson~ object. The numbers in the table objects are looked up by a counter that cycles repeatedly through the table indices, 0 to 15.
The sigmund~ object is a third-party object for pitch tracking designed by Miller Puckette and Ted Apel, available on their page of downloadable Max objects
Analog synthesizers of the early 1970s often included a "sequencer" capable of cycling through a timed sequence of 16 different voltages (which would most commonly be used to control the pitch of an oscillator). This likely explains why so many fast 16-note repeating patterns appeared in electronic music of that time period. Most voltage sequencers allowed the user to set the voltage for each step of the sequence, and to adjust the timing interval (rate) of the sequence.
To delay a single bang message by a certain amount of time, use the delay object. But to delay any other sort of message—a number, a list, even a group of different messages—use pipe. The pipe object dynamically allocates memory as it stores more and more messages, so it can keep track of many messages at once, even if they arrived at different times and have different delay times (unlike the delay object, which can only hold one bang at a time).
To invert a musical phrase around a particular axis of symmetry, multiply the axis pitch by 2, then subtract the played pitches from that. For example to invert all pitches around the axis of middle C (MIDI key 60), you would subtract the pitches from 120.
The left part of this example shows the use of the random object to make arbitrary note choices. Every time random receives a bang in its inlet, it sends out a randomly chosen number from 0 to one less than its argument. In this case it chooses one of 61 possible key numbers, sending out a number from 0 to 60. We then use a + object to offset that value by 36 semitones, transposing up three octaves to the range 36 to 96––cello low C to flute high C.
The line object interpolates linearly from its current value to some new destination value, ramping over a specified period of time, reporting its intermediate values along the way. In this example, we instruct line to ramp toward a given destination value, arriving there in 2 seconds, sending out a report of its progress (the intermediate values as it goes toward the destination) 12 times per second (i.e., once every 83.333 milliseconds).
There are many objects available for delaying events (i.e., for scheduling events to happen at a specific future moment). For timing and scheduling events, the most common object is the metro object (send bang periodically at a specified time interval), which can be used to trigger events, start/stop entire processes, or trigger a counter to step through a table or a coll or any sort of sequence of things.
To store any series of integer numbers as an array, the table object is most convenient. You can look up the stored numbers by referring to their index location within the table. Thus, you can read through the numbers in the array, in order, using a counter object.