Similarly to the sample and hold object sah~, the snapshot~ object can be used to capture the amplitude of a signal at a specific instant. Whereas sah~ sends out a constant signal, however, snapshot~ sends out a single Max message. Thus, you can think of snapshot~ as providing a message that “takes a snapshot” of, and reports the amplitude of, a signal at one specific instant. You can either trigger snapshot~ with a ‘bang’ message, or you can set it to report automatically at a certain interval of time.

report signal value

This patch does almost exactly the same thing as the example demonstrating Sample and hold. The main distinction is that snapshot~ is controlled by the Max event scheduler, whereas the sah~ object uses a triggering signal, and thus is potentially “sample-accurate” in its timing. If you don’t need sample-level timing accuracy, this snapshot~ method is slightly more computationally efficient.

The noise~ object continually produces random sample values from -1 to 1. The snapshot~ object grabs and reports one of those samples every 125 ms. Using a *~ and a +~ object, we can move that value (from -1 to 1) into a range from 440 to 880 (660 ± as much as 220) to be used as the frequency value for a cycle~ oscillator.

The idea of “sample and hold” is to capture the amplitude of a signal at a particular instant in time, and hold it constant for a while. In MSP, the sah~ object allows you to do just that. The signal you want to sample goes in the left inlet of sah~, and a triggering signal goes in the right inlet. Whenever the triggering signal surpasses a particular threshold (going upward), whatever the amplitude value of the left inlet’s signal is at that instant will be sent out as a constant signal value, until the next trigger.

Capture a new value periodically

The phasor~ object is a good candidate to use as a repetitive triggering signal because it produces a reliably repeating shape. In this example, a threshold value of 0.5 is used by sah~, and because phasor~ always goes upward from 0 to 1, it’s sure to pass 0.5.

The noise~ object continually produces random sample values from -1 to 1. The sah~ object grabs and holds one of those samples, triggered by the phasor~ which is surpassing the threshold 8 times per second. Using +~ and a *~ objects you can move that value (from -1 to 1) into a range from 440 to 880 to be used as the frequency value for a cycle~ oscillator. (In this example, we first move the value into the range 0 to 1, then move that into the range 440 to 880, to show the conversion explicitly.)