LM: I suppose since a lot of people won’t know what LIVE is, versus something like ProTools or Logic, what do you think some of the basic distinctions are that you could make between those types of programs?

JO: Right, so a common tool for digital audio production is what’s called a digital audio workstation [DAW], and this is the kind of thing where you have a linear grid of waveforms, you line them up over time. Time is represented as a horizontal axis, and it’s very intuitive to think of sound in that way and you have a visual representation of these different waveforms overlapping in time and control over different aspects of their parameters. So LIVE is essentially one of these kinds of programs, but the architecture of how you assemble things is a little bit different. It does influence the way that the music is made. I find a lot of times that when music is made in LIVE it assumes the idea of the loop as a starting point—of a particular sound sample that is repeated over and over again, but that there are continuous real-time manipulations made. So if you have a filter on that sound, then the cut-off frequency of that filter is going to change over real-time gradually from one point to another. So you get this kind of sweeping effect, and you hear that a lot with music that’s made in that software. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the only thing it can do, but it can steer you in that direction, and being aware of that is a useful thing.


Also, in the development the software branching out in that way by creating things like ‘Max for LIVE,’—and that’s the collaboration with Cycling’74 and their software Max/MSP—to bring in some more modular ways of thinking into the program. So there’s an interface between linear-but-cyclical time, and also a modular approach. So maybe that’s a good opportunity to talk a little bit about Max.

LM: So, what could Max be used for that you couldn’t do with a DAW?

JO: I wouldn’t necessarily want to say “couldn’t” in any of these cases, but Max—when you open the program it’s just a blank square, which you might think of an analog to a word processor. When you open something like Microsoft word it’s just a blank white page. I suppose that’s meant to be indicative of a kind the freedom—that you’re building a process of sound or some kind of structure for sound from the ground up. And you have these little modules, these little one-lines of code that might have some arguments that are then connected by a little inlet, drawing a patch cord to another object. So it’s graphical, allowing some degree of coding but in maybe in a more intuitive way. One is put in mind of interactions between different processes. And one thing software is very good at is different favors of random. So the supposed freedom of starting with a white space is one thing, but there are a lot of ways that the program can steer you—or just conventions of ways of working with the program that can steer a particular aesthetic. So a lot of music made in Max can then sound very aleatoric, or different things like that. Any of these softwares, however they might market themselves as being kind of liberating, have their own constraints.