I checked my google analytics page today and found my bounce rate was over 80%. After having taken the time to find out what that meant I read google’s (not at all evil) guide to writing web headlines. Hence the title.

I’ve spent the past fortnight polishing up an external I wrote to analyse, segment and store information on sounds in MaxMSP, there are a couple of other objects that do similar stuff like Jehan’s analyzer~ or the mac only and now defunct slice~ but I wanted something that could work offline, automated and in a database friendly fashion. The version I came up with to achieve this uses a fairly thick wrapper, written in mxj, around Holger Crysandt’s java MPEG7 encoder.So what are the five reasons why this might be any use to you?

1. How often do you find yourself wishing you had a simple beat slicer like that of recycle, kontakt or live in max that didn’t need a load of patching on your part but could just be dropped in to work with files or audio? I work with libraries of breakbeats in my music making and spend a lot of time slicing, plus for generative art pieces as I am wont to create, segmenting audio is often the first step in reappraising and changing existing works into new ones.
2. Wouldn’t it be nice if when the slicing was finished rather than grouping kicks, snares, hats and other percussion by hand you could let the computer do it for you? A slicer that has inbuilt audio analysis is the first step for doing this.
3. When you’re working on a beat and you want to try similar sounds wouldn’t it be nice if the computer could suggest similar sounds from a set you’ve specified? Analysed audio with good metadata can make this possible.
4. Isn’t life too short to spend an age cutting and labelling every beat before deciding if they even work in a track? By using automated tools for cutting up audio you could test many sounds, find surprising new relationships before saving the segments for use in whatever package you fancy.
5. Segmented, meta-data heavy audio file formats such as MPEG7 open up some interesting new possibilities for generative and interactive audio as well as regular music applications, why not get ahead on an emerging standard by spending a few hours knobbing about with it in everyone’s favourite graphical patching language?

That’s it, those were my five reasons, and if you don’t click on the below photo for a closer look at my MPEG7 external development then my bounce rate will only increase. Expect a buggy beta this week.

Screenshot of MPEG7 encoder and database externals for MaxMSP, writing helpfiles and proper documentation are some of the least fun things I do.