FIVE WAVES ANNOTATED (Patreon)

[EDIT: Uploaded a complete folder of screenshots as a zip cos Patreon png compression is bad].

Five Waves is a song from replicr, 2019. It started life as a Max patch. If you’re not sure what that means: Max is a piece of music software, a patch is an arrangement of instructions and/or sounds put together in a particular way inside of it to make noise. If you know what a modular synth looks like, it is sort of a digital equivalent of that. You might remember us talking about this a while ago with the ZGEN patches. The patch we are talking about today originally looked like the image at the top of this post.

We shared this patch on the internet back in 2017 (you can still find it on pastebin here: https://pastebin.com/veJtFBZ5, or on the enthusiastically-formed and then quickly-abandoned Decomposition Theory tumblr blog), before we’d actually written the song Five Waves. It was one of the many Max patches knocking about during our Decomposition Theory project, but it never made it to the initial live shows, as at some point it got put to the side as something we wanted to use to build a more concrete piece of music around.

We are now sharing a cleaned up and fully annotated version, in the hope that even if you’re not a musician, but are curious about how this kind of electronic music (or specifically this song) comes together, you can still make some sense of it. This should run on pretty much any modern-ish computer. (For anybody making comparisons - apart from removing some 'gate~' objects at the very end of the patch, this has been cleaned up but is functionally identical to the original patch found online and used to turn into the song Five Waves).

If you would like to get it running on your computer and play about with it, here are some instructions:

1. Download Max here: https://cycling74.com/downloads. (It is commercial software that costs quite a lot, but it is free to download and it works just fine to open existing patches, you just cannot save any changes.

2. Download the FiveWavesAnnotated patch attached to this blog post. It should have a .maxpat file extension.

3. Launch Max, and then in Max open this patch.

4. The first time you open Max, you might need to set up your sound output. On a Mac, go to Options > Audio Status and from a dropdown menu of sound devices, choose the appropriate sound device. (And have the driver set to Core Audio). If you’re on a PC…er… do something similar??

Once the patch is open, pressing the big toggle at the top in the middle should start the music. Follow the annotations, double click any of the yellow objects to open them up and see more details and annotated sub-patches inside them.  These objects all do different things, sometimes obvious, sometimes not. Sometimes you can double click on them to see the things inside and sometimes you cannot. Hopefully the annotations clear that up. In terms of the flow of information between these objects, grey cables are sending information - numbers or messages or lists of data, while the coloured, dotted cables are sending actual audio information. Most of the time, 65days patches tend to only use grey cables to throw data and logic around, controlling audio that we are making elsewhere, but on this occasion, the patch is self-contained.

Some screenshots here of some of the sub patches found inside the main patch, for people who don’t wanna give it a go directly…

Give us a shout if you’re having a hard time getting it up and running, or jump onto our Discord channel where there’s definitely a few people knocking about with some experience of Max who might be willing to help. And be sure to share if you are able to use this as a jump-off point for anything new!