1.6 Practice Paragraph 1.

6 - Int roduct ion to panning

Returning to the patch, on the rig ht is a gro o ve- object with the argumen t
"sound", wh ich refers to t he name of the buff er fo r it to read. Clicking on
the to gg le at t he top w ill activate t his object; note t hat the values 0 and 1
generated by th is toggle are converted into a signal by t he sig- object,42
because t he groo v e- object, unlike s f p lay- , needs a signal on its left inlet
in order to read its sound file. The "loop 1" message puts t he sound into loop
mode, in wh ich the file w ill continuous ly play, start ing again from t he beginning
wh en it reaches the end. Mod ify ing the contents of t he numbe r box connected
to t og gle w ill modify the speed at wh ich the sound is read (0.5 is half speed,
2 is do uble speed, etc.). We wi ll learn much more about gr o ov e- in Chapter
5. What remains to be explained is the fina l object, loadbang , w hich is con-
nected to t he message box conta ining "loop 1". This obj ect generates a bang
every ti me t he patch is opened; in practice w hen we load the fi le 01_ 16_buffer-
groove.maxpat, the load.bang object sends "bang " to the message box, which
then sends th e message "loop 1" to the g r oove - object. This cascade of
messages saves you from having to manually click on t he startup message box
wheneve r you open the patc h.

1.6 INTRODUCTION TO PANNING

As we saw in Section 1.6 of the theory, to position a sound in a stereophon ic
f ield, we need to calculate a multip lication factor for the vo lume of the two
channe ls, tak ing into account that the perceived intensity of the sound w ill be
proportiona l to the powe r of its signal.
First, we must calculate a multiplication facto r for the relative volumes of the
two channels. If for example, we want a sound panned f ully to t he lef t, t he mul-
tipl ication factor for the left channel w ill be 1, and 0 for the right. If we wa nt a
centered sound, the facto r for both channels wil l be 0.5. If we want th e sound to
be panned f ully right, the facto r for the right channel wil l be 1, and 0 fo r the left.
Intermediate positions can be captured by using approp riate intermediate values.
You should be able to see that the mu lt iplication facto rs for t he right and left
channe ls are comp lement ary. W hen one goes up, t he othe r goes down. We
can simu late, for example, moving sound from the left channe l to th e rig ht, in
o rder to see how the mult iplication facto rs fo r t he two channels w ill change:

Sound position left channel factor right channel factor

Fully left 1 0
Partially left .75 .25
Centered .5 .5
Part ially right .2 5 .75
Fully right 0 1

Table A

42 We wi ll speak of the differences between signals and Max messages in the first section of
Int erlude A.
104