PD (acronym of Pure Data) has recently emerged amongst the many software devoted to real time sampling and audio/video streaming, mostly thanks to its flexibility during live performances. It’s a real time coding environment suitable for video, audio and graphic editing. Roman Haefeli has developed an environment made for facilitating electronic musicians’ jam sessions on a network basing on PD. It’s a client-server system, so it works on any network (internet included), and its name, NetPD, derives from this feature. But this is not intended as a platform for creating sounds, but as an environment where every client (i.e. every computer connected to a NetPD server) can share its music patches. The most interesting part is that the same patches can be played through NetPD, and this implemented feature triggers the jam sessions, welcoming all the different contributions. A further peculiarity is that you can’t share sound files (even if they are embedded in a patch). On one hand this makes samples sharing impossible, but on the other hand it handles the real innovative significance of the generative music.

Vito Campanelli