A long time ago -- must be 15 years now, musicians working at IRCAM - the
french musical research institue - began to use a tool called "ISPW/MAX".
Max was a revolutionnary piece of software : it allowed the musician to design
its own numeric instruments easily with a nice mouse-driven interface, by connecting
objects to other objects. These intruments could interact with external signals
( like a voice, the sound of an instrument ) in a real-time manner. It was originally
written by Miller Pukette.
Later on, engineers at IRCAM ported Max, which was written for Macintosh systems,
to the UNIX-like systems they used. These systems were named ISPW, and were based
on a Next architecture.
After ten years of production, Max had to adapt to new computers, which had become
more powerful than the original Macintoshes it was written for. Instead of simply
correcting Max, a team of IRCAM researchers decided to re-program it completely with
up-to-date design concepts and new tools. As some part of that new project was
written in the Java programming language, it was decided to call it "jMax".
jMax is now a mature, widely-used software tool. Notorious contemporary musicians
use it in their latest compositions - just pick recent compositions from Pierre
Boulez or Philippe Manoury to see what is may sound like.
And, last but certainly not least, jMax is free software. It is covered
by the GNU General Public Licence, which states that you are free to use,
copy, distribute and modify jMax under certain conditions. Please refer to
the "COPYRIGHT" file which is shipped along with jMax.
As documentation is the nerve of the daily struggle we lead against computers,
this paper aims at helping you to get familiar with jMax concepts and use. It is meant to
be read as a short introductory tutorial. It is by no means
an exhaustive reference paper for jMax objects, nor is it a comprehensive treaty about
digital signal processing. Adequate pointers are provided in the last section of this paper.
The author of this paper assumes you have a little bit of knowledge about what is a signal,
and have an idea on how a digital device handles it. Read my lips : you're not supposed to be
a computer scientist to take advantage of this document. It is aimed at musicians who want
to make music with jMax, without losing time with computer-specific problems. Actually,
I hope this paper will really have a "very useful terrorizing effect" on your computer (after
J. Laventhol's remark).
This document does NOT cover platform-specific problems, like installation or configuration,
which depends on the kind of hardware (computer, sound card) you work with (I heard that
a document describing these procedures is currently being worked on at IRCAM). It describes
jMax as of version 2.4.12, the latest stable one to that day.
The author of this document can be emailed at fmfab at chez.com. Please
report him bugs, comments, suggestions...
Okay. Time for a little bit of music now.
