This is to announce a number of externals written by Cyrille Henry for Pd for simulating physical models; all original documentation, examples and a paper submitted to the ICMC 2004 conference can be found here. These exterals implement mass/spring/interactor models of Neutonian motion; we do not mean physical modelling as a method of audio synthesis.

What I have done is ported the externals for Max/MSP for OS X, using a python script that does fancy search and replaces. Note that this script worked well for what I wanted, but is in no way gauranteed to work everywhere.

Notes about this release:

1. MOST IMPORTANT: Please look at the original Pd release for explanations, documentations, examples, and all else. This means you may have to install Pd and GEM (most of his examples use GEM), but if you haven't already it may be worth your time for a number of reasons besides pmpd.

2. I have made all the externals and their help files available for Max/MSP on OS X. I have ported NONE of the extremely impressive and noteworthy examples.

3. I have used the naming convention 'pmpd.objectname' for the max externals, where 'objectname' is the English name of the object. The original Pd release has a number of aliases for each object so that 'link' and 'lia' both work, as do 'mass' and 'masse'. In this release ONLY the actual name of the external file works. Also note that the external's name is NOT always like the same as the .c file's name.

4. You will fine two forms of additional documentation. First, a simple patch named 'pmpd test patch'. Second is a few abstractions and an example patch inside the folder 'ali.pmpd'. Look there for some ideas of how to deal with larger structures.

5. My Max/MSP source code is included. Please see Cyrille's release for license (GNU Public License) as well as the original Pd source code.

Contacts and Links:

pmpd: http://drpichon.free.fr/pmpd/
pmpd for Max: http://www.cnmat.berkeley.edu/~ali/share/max/pmpd/pmpd-for-max.sit
Cyrille Henry (author): cyrille.henry@la-kitchen.fr
Ali Momeni (Max/MSP port): ali@cnmat.berkeley.edu