Sometimes the skills we learn as adventurous artists seem very ephemeral and arcane, but even these may eventually be of help in very mundane situations. I’m typing this in my hotel room on the morning of a pulp.noir rehearsal day. Waking in the night I had realized that my phone’s battery was going to run out before my alarm was supposed to wake me, and that I’d left the charger at the space where we rehearse. Needing to make sure I’d still get up in time, I made this little Max patch that would wake me by playing a sound file at 8 o’clock.
This took me about thirty seconds I should say, rather than going online and spending time looking for, downloading and setting up an existing app.
And this, of course, is pretty much the most basic way to use [date], the object that allows you to use the computer’s clock to trigger and control events in (the programming environment) Max. If you want to compose music that changes according to the date and time of day, this is the place to start.
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