Wednesday, June 24
7:00 - 8:30 PM
AS220 Labs
115 Empire St., 2nd floor
Come down to AS220 Labs and join the Pd club for it's first meeting!
Pd (Pure Data) is a graphical programming language and open source project with a large and growing user base. Pd is widely used by artists to create interactive computer music and multimedia works, and to some extent is interoperable with its commercial cousin Max/MSP.
The Pd club will be a periodic, informal gathering (a "patching circle") where Providence-area "patchers" can work together, exchange ideas, trouble-shoot, and learn from one-another. The club is open to all, from beginners to experts. Artists, students, teachers, programmers, hobbyists, and the "just-curious" are welcome. The only requirements are that you like a challenge and have a laptop.
On the agenda for the first meeting will be an introduction to Pd by Shawn Greenlee. Shawn will cover the basics of patching, working with sound, and handling communication with Arduino boards and MIDI devices.
Before the meeting adjourns, we'll get beginners up and running and determine the summer schedule for meetings.
What to bring: your laptop with Pd-extended installed. Pd-extended is available (for free) at http://puredata.info/downloads
More about Pd from the Pure Data portal.
Pd (aka Pure Data) is a real-time graphical programming environment for audio, video, and graphical processing. It is the third major branch of the family of patcher programming languages known as Max (Max/FTS, ISPW Max, Max/MSP, jMax, etc.) originally developed by Miller Puckette and company at IRCAM. The core of Pd is written and maintained by Miller Puckette and includes the work of many developers, making the whole package very much a community effort. Pd was created to explore ideas of how to further refine the Max paradigm with the core ideas of allowing data to be treated in a more open-ended way and opening it up to applications outside of audio and MIDI, such as graphics and video.
It is easy to extend Pd by writing object classes ("externals") or patches ("abstractions"). The work of many developers is already available as part of the standard Pd packages and the Pd developer community is growing rapidly. Recent developments include a system of abstractions for building performance environments; a library of objects for physical modeling; and a library of objects for generating and processing video in realtime.
Pd is free software and can be downloaded either as an OS-specific package, source package, or directly from CVS. Pd was written to be multi-platform and therefore is quite portable; versions exist for Win32, IRIX, GNU/Linux, BSD, and MacOS X running on anything from a PocketPC to an old Mac to a brand new PC. It is possible to write externals and patches that work with Max/MSP and Pd using flext and cyclone.
