Preparing Patches for Organelle™
A Little Bit about Pure Data (Pd)
While this chapter will not teach you how to use Pure Data, you should have a basic
understanding of what it is. A few introductory remarks are in order.
What is Pd? And where?
Pure Data
(
Pd
) was created by Miller Puckette and has been available in some form since
1996. Various versions/distributions of the program are currently available. The one used by
Organelle is the official, basic version, so-called
Pd vanilla
(or just plain
Pure Data
[
Pd
]).
Pure Data is free, and it is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux platforms, etc. To continue
with this chapter, you should at least open Pure Data on your computer. Current builds for
various operating systems can be downloaded from either
the official site
or from
Miller
Puckette’s site
.
“Programming” in Pure Data
Pure Data is a visual multimedia programming environment. What this means in that
“programming” here consists of selecting
objects
(think
modules
) that have been provided
and then interconnecting them with
cords
(yes, like
patch cords
). The clear analogy here is
to modular sound synthesis, and many of the same concepts apply in programming Pure
Data.
Since the low-level objects are already built for us, our task is to think and work at a higher
level, creating a patch that achieves our desired objective. This higher-level approach is the
key to Pure Data: you focus on concepts and functionality, trusting that the fundamental
blocks will do their job (when connected appropriately).
A brief aside. Pure Data can be stable, and it can also be unstable. The difference is almost
always the quality of the programming. While this sounds like a great deal of responsibility,
realize that environments like Pd are really software sandboxes; you are encouraged to play
around because you are rather unlikely to break something beyond repair. The worst case
scenario is that you waste some time, but even then, you will definitely learn something!
Learning More on Your Own
This chapter will continue with some details about the operation and objects of Pure Data
from the perspective of Organelle, but this short preface is as far as we will go with general
Pure Data concepts. The
Pure Data homepage
has a number of resources, including
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