Preface

This book is about the creation of multimedia content with a strong emphasis on real-time generation of content. The two software packages, Max/MSP and TouchDesigner, are chosen as specialized tools to make the generation of audio and video material as flexible and intuitive as possible. Programming inside these languages/tools makes it easy to come up with any tool you might need in order to realize most abstract visions of artistic expression or simply to automate a process that needs to be done regularly. Have you ever lacked control over one of your favorite audio or video effects? Well, let's just build it ourselves! Have you always had an idea for your perfect individual synthesizer? By the end of this book, you'll be able to build it! Both artists and technically interested people are addressed, as the goals of the provided code are not only always headed towards practical needs of multimedia arts but also explained technically.

This book attempts to provide all the necessary tools and crafts in order to enable you to achieve both technical and artistic aims. All of them? Both software packages, Max/MSP and TouchDesigner, are well documented. Trying to replace this documentation of two fast-changing pieces of software would be inappropriate. This book relies on you to consult this documentation, and therefore, the content of this book will go a lot further. While the initial chapters will address people who have never worked with the software, at the end of this book, very advanced topics will be covered. The idea is to not only provide a very profound basis to start with multimedia programming, but also to rely on the documentation and integrated help systems of the software packages, thereby covering as much material as possible. This idea of both providing a solid basis and reaching for advanced techniques also makes it a good repository of concepts, techniques, and best practices. This is even true for me, the author, as I have also learned a lot during the course of writing this book, and have already found myself using it to look up techniques I forgot.