Let’s Explore the Multimedia Arts
Multimedia Art is the marriage of various forms of media. As a composer and video artist, Dr. Lawrence W. Moore enjoys exploring the interaction between sight and sound. He also likes to make his own software tools for music and multimedia creation. Pd-L2Ork is a fantastic programming environment for doing all of these things. The software is maintained by Ivica Ico Bukvic at Virginia Tech university and is based on the open-source programming environment Pure Data developed by Miller S. Puckette. People who have used Pure Data or the more full featured past flavor of Pd called Pd-Extended would love this new, vibrant, and very much alive expanded set of tools that draws upon past flavors of Pure Data and adds its own very creative and powerful tools.
Series 01
Series 01 begins from the beginning and does not require any prior knowledge of the software. Some prior knowledge of Pure Data, its core application may be helpful and can be found in the first three episodes of Learn Synthesis with Pure Data Series 01 also hosted by Dr. Moore. The first series looks at the new GUI objects in Pd-L2Ork and looks at it unique library of data structures that are different from and easier to use than those from Pure Data. These tools are quite powerful for making both GUI interfaces and making 2D visualizations and animations for visual expression from your audio and MIDI data. The series goes on to look at GEM and those parts of this OpenGL extension of Pure Data are still working. There are elements of GEM that are still quite powerful in creating visualizations as well as interactive media.
Series 02
It’s time to launch back into Pd-L2Ork. On October 21st 2023, a new version of Pd-L2Ork was released and it sent the signal that it was time to continue the overall series. This second series begins with more GEM explorations as we take a look at particles. The overall goal of the second series is to make a visualizer for enhancing live musical performances. As always, we explore this from a learning perspective and demonstrate the tools. Pd-L2Ork is full of such tools and is a great platform for running GEM.
