SuperCollider is a work of genius! It is (loosely) a text-based, object-orientated, audio synthesis programming language, particularly well-suited to live computer music improvisation, and sound design. SuperCollider is now an open source project and was developed by James McCartney. I have been working with sc for two/three years or so, after using MaxMSP and Pd for two years. The sound-quality and flexability of sc as a live tool is unrivalled in my experience.
With Pd I have been sketching out ideas, mostly for live instruments and tools.
grissle.pd
is a multi-sample granulator controlled by mouse-cursor. It has up to 32 simultanious grains, chance-based sample switching for each grain, BP filter and amplitude envelopes for the grains, and some random stuff too. Can do infinite time-stretching, sample mashing, gestural sound events, semi-nonsensical rhythmic patterns etc. Requires the [cursor] and [OSCroute] externals, included in Pd-Extended.
With (pure)Java I was intending to make a version of a Soundingbody internet installation, with the JSyn library handling the real-time audio synthesis. However I found JSyn to be quite badly suited to synthesis-engine development and so I stopped. A little collection of experiments with this library can be found here.
Max is from the same little family of programs that produced Pd and Jmax, unlike these two it costs money to use Max beyond a 60-day demo. I used this program quite a lot when I was studying for the first two years of a degree in Music Technology. Since then I stopped using it after finding first Pd and then SuperCollider to be better suited to what I want to do. I have made a .zip of all the Max patches I ever made (about a thousand) so perhaps someone else can find a use for them.
I made this short project which combines Flash and MaxMSP, with Max running in the background synthesising all the audio for the Flash movie, in which the user is invited to make the soundtrack for a short film by moving visual elements around the page. The project uses Olaf Matthes' Flashserver Max external to send variables from Flash to a Max Standalone-patch, the Max patch then uses the position of elements within the Flash movie, and the colour of the pixels adjacent to them (as the movie plays underneath, thereby synching the sound to the film) to change variables in a sample-granularisation/Fibonacci-delay synthesis engine. I have removed the .mov and audio samples to make for a smaller download.