Mobile Python: Rapid Prototyping of Applications on the Mobile Platform

11.5. Controlling Max/MSP with a Phone

A significant number of people in the art and design community use tools such as Pure Data (www.puredata.org), vvvv (http://vvvv.org) or Max/MSP or Jitter (www.cycling74.com) for interactive audiovisual applications and art installations. vvvv is especially good for real-time video synthesis that allows interaction with many users simultaneously.

These tools provide a graphical programming environment for music, audio and multimedia. All of them allow rapid programming of powerful audiovisual applications running on the computer or a server being controlled through multimodal interfaces. We want to show here how to use your mobile phone as a user interface for such tools. For practical reasons on our side, we have chosen Max/MSP to get the basic ideas across, but you can take the same approach when using one of the others as well.

First we describe how to use Bluetooth RFCOMM to set up the communication between PyS60 on the phone and Max/MSP on your computer that will allow you to switch a sound on and off and change its frequency. On the phone, we use a graphical switch and slider to manipulate the sound by sending relevant control data to Max/MSP.

We then describe a mobile multi-user scenario which allows multiple people to interact over WiFi instead, meaning that several users at the same time can control parameters of a sound generator using the same Max/MSP application.

11.5.1. Connecting a Phone to Max/MSP using Bluetooth RFCOMM