Nicolas Marechal, a Technician on the  BA Design for Interaction and Moving Image (IMI) at London College of Communication (LCC), attended the Expo’74 conference held at New York University (NYU) in October 2011 to showcase his use of the software, Max.

Max has been used in Universities all over the world to teach electronic music, interactive and new media, sound design, and a variety of subjects to students with different backgrounds. Nicolas has developed his own tool called the IMI Max Patch which essentially is a self-learning tool and a repository for some of the Max patches made or used on the BA Design for Interaction and Moving Image at the College. Nicolas also used the tool as a focus of research for his PGCE in Teaching and Leaning which he successfully completed in 2009. His research project was entitled ‘Developing prototyping skills for interactive designers within the context of visual programming (Max)’.

Below is an example project by 2009 graduate Maximo Reccio entitled Dialogue of Noise which shows the behind the scenes programming. The piece involves a visual representation of sound going on around it.

Since the conference many other prestigious Universities have taken it on as a teaching tool including Nanyang Polytechnic in Singapore, Massarts, University of Denver and Brown University. Nicolas says “Todd Winkler from Brown University told me that he had been teaching Max for 20 years and wondered why he didn’t think of this earlier. A nice compliment I believe!”

Some example student projects using IMI Max Patch software