Marcos Alonso

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.