I’m reading Georgina Born’s Music and Digital Media A Planetary Anthropology (2022, UCL Press 
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Chapter 6 is with Joe Snype, and titled Max, music software and the mutual mediation of aesthetics and digital technologies.
The intro goes like this:
In recent years, Max – a graphical programming environment for media art practices – has come to prominence as a staple of contemporary music-making worldwide.1 Used by innumerable musicians and artists, Max software is taught to students as a core curriculum component in music, music technology and multimedia art degrees offered by thousands of institutions of higher education across the developed world. In their MusDig research, Georgina Born and Patrick Valiquet found Max to be ubiquitous in university digital music trainings in Britain and Montreal. But Max is also increasingly prominent outside academia, as evidenced by the three-day Max convention held at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in April 2019 and by a recent slew of how-to books for uninitiated coders in English, Spanish and German (Lechner 2014; Manzo and Kuhn 2015; Manzo 2016; Perales 2017; Taylor 2018). Despite Max’s established position as a global vernacular, there is scant research that investigates what the program is, the environments it inhabits, and how it is contributing to refashioning the nature of musicianship and the kinds of musical cultures evolving with music’s digitisation. Through multisite ethnography, this chapter provides a portrait of Max to inaugurate debate on these matters.
The prevailing conceptualisation of Max is formulated in terms of what it can do for those who use it. Unsurprisingly, Max’s developer, a company called Cycling ’74, presents the software as powerful, reporting that ‘for over two decades, people have been using Max to make their computers do things that reflect their individual ideas and dreams’.2 Less expected is the discourse of many Max practitioners. Online searches and conversations with users reveal scores of platitudes attesting to the program’s astonishing powers. Characteristic paeans include: ‘It’s so versatile and open-ended it can be used for practically anything’; ‘It’s pretty much capable of anything’; ‘Max can do anything you want it to’.3 The discourse that surrounds Max, then, constructs the software as aesthetically neutral, transparent and infinitely reconfigurable – a mirror reflecting back pure authorial intention. In short, as not a mediator. This type of discourse on music software has been prevalent in academic and nonacademic computer music and audio technology circles for decades.4 It envisages for Max a universal, purely technical functionality that denies its embeddedness in social and cultural formations, as well as its technical specificities and their musical consequences. Probing Max’s complex materiality and the actual uses made of Max, this chapter sets out with different assumptions: that Max and similar computer music environments are powerful mediators. They are not neutral channels supporting human musical imagination and labour; rather, they have particular proclivities that inflect, extend and transform musical imagination and labour.
The chapter is based primarily on fieldwork conducted by Joe Snape in spring 2014 at the University of California Berkeley’s (UCB) Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT).5 Probing Max’s sociomateriality via scenes deeply involved in Max design and use, it complements Valiquet’s and Born’s ethnographies (chapters 7 and 8). CNMAT has a long tradition of teaching Max to students at UCB, notably at its renowned annual Max Summer Courses in Berkeley, which ran under Adrian Freed’s stewardship until 2016, and of expanding Max’s functionality through software and hardware design. Beyond UCB, the San Francisco Bay Area is home to Max’s developer, the company Cycling '74. Many of Cycling ’74’s full-time employees live in the Bay Area and engineers working for the company hold positions at regional educational organisations. Together, Mills College and San Francisco Art Institute play important roles in fostering communities of Max users, as does Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) in Palo Alto. Individuals from these institutions and beyond participate in a vibrant experimental music scene that sees daytime developers perform as musicians by night, and in which everyday overlaps between programming cultures and musical cultures facilitate probing discussions about their interrelations.
Complementing the Berkeley fieldwork, and providing comparative perspective, was fieldwork at a second site: the 2013 Tokyo Experimental Festival (TEF) held at Tokyo Wonder Site, a contemporary arts organisation. Running for two months annually, the festival invites musicians and sound artists to undertake residencies and performances, and more than two-thirds of these used Max. In addition, as a musician, Snape has worked for almost a decade with Max alongside other users, inside and outside educational settings. His longstanding, lived engagement adds nuance to the ethnography that follows.
(I added bolding)
