This book will introduce the Pure Data software to visual artists, media designers, and programmers to develop multimedia applications graphically without the need to write codes. Creating interactive multimedia projects is a demanding task. The authoring process requires programming skills in addition to the techniques to prepare and edit digital media content. Proprietary software packages, such as Adobe Director and Adobe Flash are available for designers to author multimedia projects. For the web standard platform, designers can also use the HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript to author web-based multimedia content. Both cases demand the mastery of text-based programming skills such as JavaScript and ActionScript.
Pure Data is a free graphical programming environment where users can write programs by drawing visual objects on the screen and connect them together to form a program. This book will provide the step-by-step details to prepare interactive multimedia content by using Pure Data.
Miller Puckette is the main designer of Pure Data. When he worked at the IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in France, he developed the software Max for interactive computer music applications. The Max/MSP software from Cycling'74 (http://cycling74.com) is the commercial derivative of the original Max. Pure Data (Pd) is the free version supported by the open source community.
Pure Data was originally written for electronic music applications. Over the years, developers contributed a lot of additional features, called externals in Pure Data terms. This book will use a major external Graphics Environment for Multimedia (GEM) for the demonstration. Towards the end of the book, it also explains how readers can add other external libraries to their own system.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with Pure Data, prepares the readers with the graphical programming environment and introduces various types of windows, menu items, messages, and operation modes of Pure Data.
Chapter 2, Computer Graphics with the GEM Library, starts creating 2D and 3D graphics and simple animation by using the objects in the GEM external library.
Chapter 3, Image Processing, illustrates the pixel operations in the GEM library. It includes commands to obtain external images from the still photos, digital videos, and live webcam, and also a number of imaging filters and effects that can be commonly found in an image-processing software, such as Photoshop.
Chapter 4, Interactivity, integrates the use of mouse and keyboard controls as interaction devices and introduces the mechanism to build graphical user interface with the GEM library.
Chapter 5, Motion Detection, applies a more advanced approach for interaction design. It shows the readers how to detect motion in front of a webcam and uses the information to create interactive applications.
Chapter 6, Animation with Particle System, explains the basics of particles system in the GEM library and combines the particles system to create an artwork that responds to the readers' body movement.
Chapter 7, Audio Programming, describes the use of audio in Pure Data and helps readers to integrate audio content in their multimedia production. It also uses sound input (microphone) as an interaction device.
Chapter 8, Interface with the Outside World, enables readers to connect Pure Data programs to other systems, such as computer network, mobile phone, and external hardware through microcontroller.
Chapter 9, Extending Pure Data, provides a conclusion of learning Pure Data for multimedia production, and points to the resources that readers can seek further reference. It also demonstrates how readers can install other external libraries, such as OpenCV, and Kinect libraries.
Appendix, Communities and References, provides more information on Pure Data.
The main Pure Data website is http://puredata.info. Pure Data comes with two distributions: Pure Data and Pd-extended. Pure Data (vanilla) is the original version by Miller Puckette. Pd-extended contains Pure Data itself and a number of commonly used external libraries. This book will use the Pd-extended version as it already includes the GEM library. The website for GEM is http://gem.iem.at.
Download Pd-extended for your operating system from http://puredata.info/downloads/pd-extended. Pd-extended is available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. For Linux, Pd-extended comes with the binary packages for Ubuntu and Debian. At the time of writing, the latest release is 0.42.5. The beta release is 0.43.4.
The installation instructions for various platforms are:
Windows: Download the file and start the installer. It will automatically install in the right
Program Filesfolder.Mac OS X: Download the file, open the disk image, and drag the Pd-extended icon to the
Applicationsfolder. For OSX Mountain Lion users, you may need to install the XQuartz windows system first from http://xquartz.macosforge.org.Linux: Most Linux versions are Debian software package. Use the corresponding package manager in your Linux operating system to open it for installation.
Double-click on the Pd-extended application; you can expect to see the console window. In this book, I mainly use the Mac OSX version if platform differences are insignificant.
Pure Data applications are mainly for real-time multimedia projects. Audio-visual performers (VJ) have been using Pure Data to create interactive imageries in their performance. Media designers with no programming experience can learn to prototype their ideas very quickly with Pure Data and GEM. In creative art/design curriculum, Pure Data and Processing (http://processing.org) are the two most popular free programming platforms to teach interactivity to art/design students. The book will also provide a comprehensive set of learning outcomes for interactive media educators.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Insert a new object called gemwin to create a graphics window."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "To create a new patch, navigate to File | New to make an empty patch".
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