Jade

Interactive Performance Environment

"Jade is a serious music environment that needs to be examined by anyone doing serious MaxMSP work." -Darwin Grosse

Find out more about Jade in an interview by Darwin @ CreativeSynth.com

Open Source Package for Composition & Performance

Jade is a flexible, relatively easy-to-use, environment for composition and performance. For many Jade has made approaching the complexities of interactive music possible. Now it is available for free as an open-source project.

The basic unit in Jade is a Module. Jade has a number of ready-made modules for analyzing, generating, and processing audio and video. These modules can be created using Cycling’74’s Max/MSP/Jitter authoring environment. Current Jade development is based on the Jamoma module framework.

Jade is available via SourceForge as both source patches, and a standalone application for users who do not own Max.

Taming the Beast

Composers or performers new to software for doing interactive perfomance are often overwhelmed by the enviroments and parameters that need to be managed to get started. Jade uses a single framework that does much of your work for you before you even begin a new project.

Dealing with structure is one of the most difficult aspects of working with both music and traditional computer-music programming languages and environments. Jade attempts to solve these problems. How? By providing timing mechanisms, reliable preset storing and loading, a non-linear event list handler that is malleable and easily edited, standard basic services for handling CPU load, and a flexible matrix router.

Additionally, for Max/MSP/Jitter users, it encourages habits leading to the reusability of components - all a part of the underlying Jamoma framework's philosophy.

Jade can make managing complex performances a straightforward task. Click the image to enlarge...

Flexibility for Mapping Strategies?

In producing effective art and performance, little is more important than how gesture is mapped to parameters, parameters to other parameters, analysis to resynthesis. Creating complex mappings, and then dynamically change them all in a split second can be a difficult task. Another interesting option is generatively creating and breaking new mappings of thier own.

Jade has LINK instructions to manage this (in Jamoma the LINK instruction engine is implemented in the jmod.mapper module). Any parameter in Jade can be linked to any other. Any analysis result can be linked to any parameter. In fact, links can be linked to other links. The data can be easily and intuitively scaled, and links can be created or destroyed at any point in time.

Supports MSP and Jitter for both Audio & Video

Since Jade is built on top of Cycling '74's powerful Max, MSP, and Jitter environments, it then can leverage all of Jitter's support for QuickTime, OpenGL, Shaders, and other various graphics and matrix manipulations.

Jade can perform with video similar to how it works with audio. Click the image to enlarge...

Modularity

Jade is built on Jamoma. This means that it is truely modular, and you can leverage a variety modules built by yourself or others.