Miller Puckette is known as the creator of Max and Pure Data. As an MIT student he won the 1979 Putnam mathematics competition, and then finished his doctorate at Harvard in 1986. He was a founding member of the MIT Media lab, then moved to IRCAM in Paris, and is now distinguished professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego and again in residence at IRCAM. He has also taught at Columbia University and at the Technical University of Berlin, and has won two honorary degrees, the SEAMUS award, and the 2023 Silver Lion award of the Venice Biennale Musica.
Hacking Pure Data on the ESP32 microcontroller platform
Rececenty he developed a proof-of-concept port of Pure Data to the popular ESP32 microcontroller platform. Since the Tangible Music Lab also employs this cheap and versatile platform for most of its interactive music controller projects, the opportunity of also including real-time sound programming based on Pure Data seemed quite promising. Therefore we ported Miller’s experiment to the ESP32 S3 based Waveshare Smart Speaker, also extending the performance and functionality to basic pd vanilla support. Especially we’d like to thank Ben Wesch for his efforts making that possible!
Miller Puckette will join us for a workshop taking place at the Tangible Music Lab from Tuesday May 5 until Thursday May7. Currently our develoment platform supports audio output and input, wifi networking as well as analog and digtial IO via the built-in GPIO pins. Pathches and samples are loaded from the built-in micro-SD card. During the workshop we plan a hackathon for advanced developers with the aim to improve the performance and extend the functionality of the ESPD platform. A second group of participants will develop example applications based on the smart speaker, mostly with a focus on untethered musical instruments with built-in interactive sound synthesis based on pure data.
This workshop is primarily organized for students of the Postdigital Lutherie master program, but we are open to external participants who want to support the development with their experience on the ESP-IDF development environment and SDK. Please get in touch with us if you are interested!