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Max/MSP turned out to be (slightly) easier to get my head around than I had expected...

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Syntax error?

Although it can sometimes take a while to figure out what's happening, the interactive nature of the program means that you can 'unlock' a tutorial patch and mess about with it, seeing how your changes affect things in real time. Unlike traditional programming languages (of which I have a small amount of frustrated experience), Max's visual nature means that syntax is pretty much sorted out for you. You won't get a stream of error messages if you misplace a colon or end bracket – instead, the patch will at least work a bit, which is a far more encouraging environment to learn in.

By setting challenges for myself, involving tweaking existing patches to do something slightly different, I would gain a more complete understanding of what an object does. "Can I make Max draw a circle instead of an oval? And can I colour the line red?" Well, no, but trying to still helped.

I'll post part four soon. You never know, I might have got some sound out of my computer by then…

Previous (Part 2: getting started)
Next (Part 4: music and maths)

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