Read about MIDI, and experiment with some Max patches that use MIDI, with the goal of understanding what MIDI messages do, and how they can be managed (received, modified, and transmitted) in Max.

Read “MIDI“, an explanatory essay by Christopher Dobrian.

I’ve done my best to find other readable writings on MIDI. Take a look at these Links for reading about MIDI and see which ones are at a level that is useful to you.

Try working through the MIDI Tutorials that are included in the Max Documentation. You can find them online, but you’ll want to open the tutorial patches while reading.

I’ve made a patch that shows all the MIDI objects in Max.

This example about linear mapping uses MIDI for its example, so it might be somewhat instructive. (None of the number boxes are initialized to good starting values, so you’ll need to drag them yourself. You can use the numbers in the example picture as a guide.)

This example shows random voicing of a five-note chord (by randomly transposing each pitch class some number of octaves).

There are quite a few other examples on that same page of examples from the 2013 class that deal with MIDI: notably examples 13-19.

Try generating a pattern of MIDI notes yourself using some of the objects you know such as metro, counter, random, line, and coll.