Save STEIM

Dear participants of the Pd workshop,

in reaction to current events, let me publish a post from my personal blog:

STEIM, the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music in Amsterdam, is in immediate danger of losing its governmental funding. The bottom line of the negative advise from the reviewers is that STEIM doesn’t appeal enough to the mainstream pop-music audience. Chasing ghosts of mass-media hype, the Dutch government is on the verge of shutting down an unparalleled institution for creative support, where I had the privilege to work on the projects “fello” and “noiseroom”, as well as to teach two Pd workshops with wonderful and inspiring participants. For all the details on the current developments, please head over to STEIM’s website. Although time is running out, there’s still the possibility to send a letter of support. Here’s an excerpt from my letter:

Both artistic work and technological research conducted at STEIM have influenced and benefited a large number of projects in a diversity of fields, such as academic and popular music, interactive media art, modern dance, instrument and performance theory, and the visual arts. Many of these projects have brought together participants from different countries and cultures, thanks to STEIM‘s unique ability to provide lodging, without which many projects could not have happened. Providing such support and thereby drawing in advanced projects from all over the world, STEIM serves as a beacon in the heart of Europe, bearing testimony to the open-mindedness and support of plurality that the Dutch culture is known for internationally.

Today more than ever, STEIM brings together artists from different fields and connects them with a global network of creative productivity. In the Open Studios at STEIM as well as in the guesthouse, both artistic and social exchange have found a safe haven that should be of high value to the Dutch people. STEIM is a place where well-known artists engage in experimental projects to advance their creative scope and broaden their technological as well as artistic repertoire. From my point of view as a German resident, the existence and the acceptance of STEIM, rooted in Amsterdam‘s local culture but decidedly international in its scope, is nothing but admirable.

Please help by sending your own personal letter of support.

Best,

Florian

STEIM homepage /Related posting on Createdigitalmusic.com 

Thanks for coming!

Thanks to you all for making this workshop possible. For me, it was a lot of fun and I learned a lot from figuring out answers to all the questions. Also, thanks for all the nice feedback! It’s much appreciated.

As suggested today, I will send out an email next week, asking whether you want to continue to receive relevant information and also whether you’d like to be signed up to this blog to share some of your experience working with Pd.

Best,

Florian

Day 4: Patches from the workshop

Here are the patches that were used for demonstration during the fourth day of the workshop:

Download

This was a great day, and I am amazed that we actually managed to go through all these objects. Looking at everybody’s screens, it was quite cool to see all the different individual approaches. Here are some impressions:

Best,

Florian

Addendum: Automatic scaling, HID

With reference to a question Harald asked yesterday: There is a way to automatically scale value ranges without having to manually convert them. It’s not a dedicated external, but an abstraction by Hans-Christoph Steiner, one of the gurus in the Pd scene.

Download

All it needs is the desired range of numbers as two arguments (lower and upper range limits). Manually converting might still save you some CPU cycles, though

Also, Hans-Christoph did a lot of work on the HID-object. If you are interested in using controllers with Pd, be sure to check out his HID&mapping objects.

Download

Best,

Florian

Most recent download for Mac OS X

To get everybody started from the same base, here’s the link to the most recent autobuild version of Pd:

Pd 0.40.3 ext 080316

On Windows, please stick to the official release version at puredata.info.

Best,

Florian

Workshop times

The regular times for the workshop will be 10 am to 4 pm, with a lunch break from 12.30 – 2 pm. After 4 pm, I will be available to assist participants working on their own projects in an “open-studio” situation.

Best,

Florian

Workshop Framework

Below is a rough framework for the workshop. This is to ensure that everybody gets a thorough introduction into the different fields we will cover.

Day 1: Installation issues, examples, basic concept, data types, file handling

Day 2: Audio integration, controllers, MIDI & OSC

Day 3: GEM I: basic concept, objects, handling of data; STEIM junXion & LiSa integration in the afternoon

Day 4: GEM II: image & video analysis, graphical user interfaces

Best,

Florian

Bring your ideas, material, hardware

As the workshop should be as non-generic as possible, it would be great to have a lot of input from everybody involved. Teaching periods will be followed by phases of assisted individual application and adaptation of the curriculum. Thus, if you want to perform with a specific controller, bring it along. If you want to work with video, bring a camera or your own movie files, and if you want to use loops or still images, have them ready on your harddrive as well. Also, for those who want to start from scratch, I will have some material available as well.

Getting material ready, please keep in mind that Pd does not support a whole lot of file formats. On a Mac, movie files have to be in the .mov format with MPEG2 compression, and on Windows, .avi files with common compressions are mandatory. Also, Pd will not load mp3s, so you will have to bring your audio files in uncompressed .wav or .aiff formats.

If you want to browse for material, a good starting point for audio material would be soundsnap.com, while for moving images, you may want to check out the extensive collections at archive.org.

Best,

Florian

Welcome to the Pd workshop blog!

This blog is designed to accompany the upcoming Pd & GEM workshop at STEIM (April 7-10, 2008). Here, I will post download links to all the patches we will cover and reference interesting material. To get started, it would be very helpful if everyone could install the correct version of Pd in advance. Don’t worry, if something doesn’t work for you, we’ll check it out on the first day at STEIM.

During the workshop, we will be using the Pd-extended distribution, as it already comes with most of the libraries and extensions I want to cover. The latest official release is 0.39.3, and can be downloaded from puredata.info/downloads. However, if you are on Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”, you have to use a newer version, as 0.39.3 is not compatible. Please download this file here.

Background info: At autobuild.puredata.info, the developers of the Pd-extended package collect versions that are created automatically from the source every night. These are no official releases, and indeed the new versions for Windows that can be found there do not work on my machines. The referenced version for Mac OS X works just fine, though, and I will actually use it on my computer during the workshop.

More info is coming soon, so feel free to subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed. I am very much looking forward to our workshop!

Best,

Florian