Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
Mikael Fernstrom showed some of the projects that have been implemented in the University of Limerick. PD allows things like a virtual Bodhrán to be prototyped and built - various sound effects, including multi-tones (like the ever rising / falling note) to be generated and something like the Tap-O-Meter to be made. The Tap-O-Meter was a real-time counter for James Devine, the fastest tap dancer in the world, to measure just how many taps per second he was able to achieve. PD allowed changes to be made quickly and with recompiling code, which makes debugging and interactive composition to take place.
Interactive sonification type projects like Squiggle and Celeritas used PD to generate audio from various sensors - and in general can be used to create audio from any data input. This provides huge flexibity and massive scope for fun, judging by some of the videos Mikael showed of IDC (Interactive Design Centre) students and staff.
Something like Max/MSP is almost becoming stale, since all the new exciting developments are happening in the open source world. PD is implemented in C, and the source code is available - so the only limitation is our imagination.
