[PD] Pd, Max/Msp, Reaktor, Plogue Bidule... How do these compare?

Roman Haefeli reduzierer at yahoo.de
Fri Mar 19 20:11:50 CET 2010


On Fri, 2010-03-19 at 11:02 -0700, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
> 
> --- On Fri, 3/19/10, Roman Haefeli <reduzierer at yahoo.de> wrote:
> 
> > From: Roman Haefeli <reduzierer at yahoo.de>
> > Subject: Re: [PD] Pd, Max/Msp, Reaktor, Plogue Bidule... How do these compare?
> > To: "Marco Donnarumma" <devel at thesaddj.com>
> > Cc: "Jonathan Wilkes" <jancsika at yahoo.com>, pd-list at iem.at, "Matteo Sisti Sette" <matteosistisette at gmail.com>, mis at artengine.ca
> > Date: Friday, March 19, 2010, 6:07 PM
> > On Fri, 2010-03-19 at 09:58 +0100,
> > Marco Donnarumma wrote:
> > 
> > > Talking about Pd It's fundamental to learn how things
> > works, imho.
> > 
> > Pd is the fundament for learning how things work. That was
> > my experience
> > (and still is). 
> > 
> > Roman
> 
> What are you getting at?  The two aren't mutually exclusive.

I am actually thinking that the two are complementary.

Of course, it helps a lot to have a certain level of knowledge in
dsp/math/whatsover before touching Pd. I just wanted to point out, that
Pd very well supports the approach of acquiring theory through practice.
Concepts such as, that every sound is composed of its sinusoidal
partials (just one example of so many possible), sound very abstract and
are hard to explain in words. But at the same time, they are often quite
easy to illustrate with Pd (see 07.additive.pd from 3.audio.examples). 

Of course, it is fundamental to learn how things works, but how do you
learn those things? My answer is: By using Pd. Similar to how a two year
old child learns the basic laws of physics by letting things fall down,
throw them away, put them on other things etc, Pd lets you explore the
nature of sound. I often feel the need of telling potential Pd users,
that it's not necessary to have read many books and be a master in math
before doing Pd, but if they do read books, it helps a lot to try things
out in Pd right away.

Btw, it was great to hear about eleven year olds working with Pd. I
wished I would have known a tool like Pd, when I was at that age,
especially in math class. Not that I had extraordinary difficulties in
understanding the matter, but it would have been so much more
interesting with a lot of formulas being translated to Pd. There is a
_huge_ didactic difference between a written representation of a formula
and Pd-patch representation with sliders and numberboxes.

Roman









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