Sand, an acousmatic composition with listener interface

Sand is a 25'-long computer-music composition. It can be experienced as a complete piece of music, listened to from beginning to end; or it can be experienced more like one might experience a painting or a sculpture: at one's own pace, examining and taking apart it's sonic events, in any order one wishes. The interface that allows this is publicly available from this page.

The best and, it seems, only reliable way of running it is to download the MAX/MSP patches, and, if you don't own MAX/MSP, you'll need to download and install the free RUNTIME version, from Cycling '74.

In any case, try it out, and send me your comments at chris at music dot columbia dot edu.

To read more about the aesthetic, technical and theoretical bases of Sand, go here.

© 1994-2007, by Christopher Bailey. All rights reserved. Warning: Unauthorized reproduction, or commercial use, of these recordings is prohibited by Federal Law and subject to criminal prosecution.

DOWNLOAD/INSTALL:
  1. You'll need the MAX/MSP application, either the fully functional version, or the Runtime (Free!!) version of it. Go to Cycling 74.

  2. Next, download the Basic_Audio_Install. This should unzip to a folder "sand" with some audio files in it.
    Windows Users:
    1. Your first step should be to download and install MAX/MSP RunTime from Cycling '74, if it (or MAX/MSP full version) is not already installed on your machine.
    2. Next, download the Basic_Audio_Install, and unzip it. When I did this on a PC, I got a bunch of wierd errors. Just ingore them. (Press OK). After unzipping, you should have 2 folders in there: Sand and _MACOSX. The former is the important one, the latter you can ignore or delete.


  3. .zip file of all the separate patches.
    Download and unzip. Copy the files out of the folder, and paste them into the "sand" folder. (Copy the files directly, DO NOT copy the surrounding folder). at the same level as the audio files (i.e. not in a sub-folder). To run Sand, double-click or open the patch uber.
    Windows users:
    1. Download the separate patches
    2. Unzip (Again, you may see a bunch of errors, just click "OK" through them.)
    3. Go into the Sand_Patches folder.
    4. Ignore the _MACOSX folder. Instead, go into the next Sand_Patches folder. You should see lots of files in here.
    5. Select all (ctrl-A).
    6. Cut (ctrl-X)
    7. Now go back into the Sand folder from step #1, above.
    8. Paste (ctrl-V) the files into here.
    9. To run the interface, start MAX/MSP RunTime (or full version). Do Open, and find the patch "Uber", which should now be in the Sand folder. (You can't run it by double-clicking Uber because (at least in my experience) it doesn't know that this is a MAX/MSP patch.)




Additional Audio (see the README):
Sections 5 - 8
Sections 9 - 14
Sections 15 - 18
Sections 19 - 21
Sections 22 - 25
Sections 26 - 29
Sections 30 - 33
Sections 34 - 36
Sections 37 - 38
Sections 39 - 41
Sections 42 - 45
Sections 46 - 48
Sections 46 - 50
Sections 51 - 52
Sections 53 - 55
Sections 56 - 57
Sections 58 - 61
Sections 62 - 63
Sections 64 - 66
Sections 67 - 69
Sections 70 - 72


For additional help, peruse the README text file. There are also Help/Info buttons on the interface itself, that you can press to get assistance immediately on starting the thing up.


You can also download the

See the database of concrete sounds, now online. Check out the 19-tone-equal-temperament pc arrays, on this page.

Examine the LISP code that generates the notes of the piece, and the various colls and buffers fed to MAX/MSP.

Also, utilities for making scores of these notes, written in php.




Also, read the original 1999 Proposal for the project.