twitterSpeak v0.2

Today I attempted an update to the twitterSpeak patch I created for MaxForLive a while back. Not entirely sure why I picked it up again, but Max is quite excellent at being a vortex that sucks in a good part of your day until you can’t remember how it started.

The main difference between v0.1 and v0.2 is that the latter breaks each tweet into individual words, and these words are triggered in relation to a master BPM. This is something that I thought would be cool in Ableton Live. After doing most of the patching in the standalone Max software, I took it across to MaxForLive where it promptly crashed Ableton. Every time I tried it. I think the problem lies in the aka.speech object using OS X’s speech generation, and therefore not producing audio within Ableton itself. This ultimately makes it kind of pointless as a MaxForLive device, even without the crashing business.

Nevertheless, feel free to grab the Max patch and have a play around for yourselves. If anyone figures out how to get it working in Ableton, I’d love to hear about it. A few caveats: you’ll only be able to run this on OS X and will need the aka.speech and mxj searchtweet objects.