EnviFX — Moving On

There's a certain kind of creative work that teaches you exactly what you needed to learn, and then quietly asks to be released.

EnviFx was one of those for me.

About a year ago, I built a Max for Live device called EnviFx. The idea was simple in ambition, complicated in execution: pull live environmental data from the Smart Citizen platform — air quality, temperature, humidity, light levels — and map it directly to any parameter inside Ableton Live. Your reverb decay driven by CO₂ concentration. Your filter cutoff opening and closing with the city's ambient noise. The environment becomes the performer.

It works. Somewhat.

The core of it is functional. You can map sensor readings to Ableton parameters and hear your city inside your music. But there's a problem I never fully solved: the Smart Citizen devices aren't always online. When one goes offline, the device breaks until you manually update which sensors are active. I tried to make this dynamic — have it automatically detect and display only the live devices — but Max 8 pushed back in ways I didn't have the patience to untangle. And then, gradually, my attention moved on.

I lost passion for this project but maybe someone could pick it up in the future. EnviFx has had 318 downloads since I posted it in February. Someone left a comment: "acercándonos al mundo desde sus emergencias más inmediatas" — bringing us closer to the world through its most immediate emergencies. That's exactly it. That's the whole thing.

The project touched something real. It just outgrew what I could give it.