O’Reilly: Make Your Own Music Software with Pure Data

To create a program in Pd, you connect little boxes to one another with the mouse using graphic “patch cords.” […] Once you’ve created or loaded a patch, you can interact with it by sending MIDI messages to your computer from a hardware controller and by using onscreen sliders and buttons.

If you’ve ever seen or used Cycling ’74’s Max, Pd will look eerily familiar. To a considerable extent, Pd is Max. Puckette created Max at IRCAM, the French research facility, in the mid-1980s.

I tried using Pure Data years ago and just couldn’t get it. Now with more documentation and a larger community, I’m definitely going to try again.