Günter Geiger

The reacTable: exploring the synergy between live music performance and tabletop tangible interfaces

In recent years we have seen a proliferation of musical tables. Believing that this is not just the result of a tabletop trend, in this paper we first discuss several of the reasons for which live music performance and HCI in general, and musical instruments and tabletop interfaces in particular, can lead to a fertile two-way cross-pollination that can equally benefit both fields. After that, we present the reac Table, a musical instrument based on a tabletop interface that exemplifies several of these potential achievements.

The reacTable*: A Collaborative Musical Instrument

The reacTable* is a novel multi-user electro-acoustic musical instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. In this paper we focus on the various collaborative aspects of this new instrument as well as on some of the related technical details such as the networking infrastructure. The instrument can be played both in local and remote collaborative scenarios and was designed from the very beginning to serve as a musical instrument for several simultaneous players

The reacTable: a tangible tabletop musical instrument and collaborative workbench

The reacTable* is an electronic multi-user musical instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface developed by a team of digital luthiers at the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona. The instrument is designed both for novices (in installations) as well as for advanced electronic musicians (in concerts). It allows several simultaneous performers to share control by moving physical artefacts on a table surface and constructing different audio topologies in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

Giantsteps-progress towards developing intelligent and collaborative interfaces for music production and performance

We present the GiantSteps project, an EU-funded project involving institutions from academia, practitioners, and industrial partners with the goal of developing new concepts for intelligent and collaborative interfaces for music production and performance. At the core of the project is an iterative, user-centric research approach to music information retrieval (MIR) and human computer interaction (HCI) that is designed to allow us to accomplish three main targets, namely (1) the development of intelligent musical expert agents to support and inspire music makers, (2) more intuitive and collaborative interfaces, and (3) low-complexity methods addressing lowcost devices to enable affordable and accessible production tools and apps. In this paper, we report on the main findings and achievements of the projects first 18 months.