Max for Live is a powerful environment, allowing to program audio and midi patches with a visual paradigm (similarly to TouchDesigner).
Since it’s built-in Ableton Live, it’s possible to create audio effects, midi effects and virtual instruments with GUI controls that look like Live’s native ones (sliders, buttons, knobs, etc.) and that can be midi mapped in the same manner as well (see fig. 2).
The Overtone Series
We created a patch that sequences, in a random manner, the natural overtone series of a note.
The overtone series exhibits an interesting phenomenon on how humans perceive sounds. While the frequencies increase linearly starting from a base, the perception of the music interval contracts, manifesting our logarithmic perception of sounds.
Nonetheless, while the perception of the first overtones sounds consonant (with just intervals like octave, fifth, fourth, major third), the upper overtones start to exhibit a more dissonant behaviour.
The Patch
The environment of Max consists of blocks. Every block can have inputs and outputs, either in the form of data or signals, and represents a processing unit.
In our patch, the central block is the cycle~
which generates a sinusoidal signal as output by providing a frequency as first input.
The overtone series is built by multiplying a base frequency over