Sunday Synth Jam: This video features a Reactable jam by Carles López at El Grial in Ibiza, as part of the Ibiza International Music Summit.

More Reactable jamming below!

Click here to view the embedded video.

via marcosalonso:

Image: fr1zz

One of a very nice collection of Musikmesse 09 photos by frizz.

The Reactable is a rather sextacular collaborative electronic music instrument that features a tabletop tangible multi-touch interface.

via the Synthtopia Flickr Pool

Musikmesse 2009: Some more German coverage, this time of the Reactable Systems Reactable. Audio demo section kicks in about halfway.

via musotalk

Frankfurt Musikmesse 2009. Newly-formed company Reactable Systems has announced plans to put the Reactivision-based Reactable into production.

The Reactable is a new electronic musical instrument that combines state of the art technologies with a simple and intuitive design, which enables musicians to experiment with sound, change its structure, control its parameters and be creative in a very direct way.

The kind of interface that the Reactable uses is called tangible, because the musicians use different shaped tangible pucks in order to control the system. The Reactable is based on a translucent and luminous round table, and by putting these pucks on the Reactable surface, by turning them and interacting them with each other, performers can combine different elements like synthesizers, effects, sample loops or control elements in order to create a unique and flexible composition.

via musicradartv

Projects featured include:

• Audiopad – a composition and performance instrument for electronic music which tracks the positions of objects on a tabletop surface and converts their motion into music.
• Audio d-touch – a set of 3 applications for music composition and performance: the Augmented Stave, the Tangible Drum Machine and the Physical Sequencer.
• The Music Table – an experimental composing system that provides a tactile and visual representation of music that can be easily manipulated to make new musical patterns.
• The Circular Optical Object Locator is a collaborative and cooperative music-making device.
• The ISS cube – a surround sound mixer that tracks the position of several physical objects on a tabletop surface to provide the user with an intuitive way of creating a non-linear soundscape.
• AudioCube – an installation that allows a group of users to create their own three-dimensional soundscape.
• Bach Blocks – a game that encourages children to create totally original music. The blocks are physical analogs to musical notes with color associated to pitch and block size to beat length.
• Chessynthesis is a performance project. It consists in a classical chess game, with a chessboard and 32 pieces, but a captation system analyzes the position and the evolution of the gameplay, and transcode it to sound.

Many more are featured at the site.

via USO on Twitter

This video captures Canada’s Technofunk Collective in action. 

Technofunk’s recent performance at the Fritz Helder and the Phantoms CD release party unveiled their prototype “reactifunk” table.

Through some reverse engineering and loads of tinkering the collective has adapted the basic software of the funkiest musical instrument in the world, the Reactable. Inspired by Bjork’s recent live show which showcased the instrument, Technofunk’s ‘reactifunk’ explores alternate usages of the concept.

This Reactable demo video sure looks pretty – but the functionality shown should be familiar to longtime Synthtopia readers. 

I have to ask the same thing I asked about using the iPhone as a Lemur – is this just eye candy?

Reactable is a collaborative electronic musical instrument with a tangible interface based on a table, and inspired by modular synthesizers of the sixties. It was developed by the Music Technology Group at the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.

Multiple simultaneous users share total control over the instrument by moving and rotating physical objects on the surface of a bright circular table. Manipulating these objects, representatives of the classical components of a modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sound typologies, generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer. There are only 5 reacTable, one of which was sold to Icelandic singer Bjork.

Lautstark (Star TV) war in Barcelona an der Red Bull Music Academy. Und in einem der Studios stand der unglaubliche “Reactable” (welchen übrigens auch Björk auf ihrem letzten Album -Volta- verwendet hat) … 
Pepepe war der einzige, der den Tisch so richtig im Griff hatte, was er uns hier mal schnell demonstriert.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Reactable in action in Ibiza, 2008. 

Unfortunately, Reactable suffers from Tenori-On syndrome. The captivating interface seems to be substituting for creating exciting, original music.

The reacTable in campusbot, campusparty, Valencia 2008.

Video by criadobot:

Specifications, collaborative electronic musical instrument with a tangible interface based on a table, and inspired by modular synthesizers of the sixties. It was developed by the Music Technology Group at the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, a research team composed of Sergi Jordà, Marcos Alonso, Günter Geiger and Martin Kaltenbrunner.

Multiple simultaneous users share total control over the instrument by moving and rotating physical objects on the surface of a bright circular table. Manipulating these objects, representatives of the classical components of a modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sound typologies, generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer.

There are only 5 reacTable, which included the one that was sold to Icelandic singer Bjork.

This video is great – it shows off the ReacTable’s sexy tangiility – without even understanding the instrument, you can see clear relationships between what the performer is doing and what you are hearing.

via Matrix

This Reactable demo from AHNE 2008 highlights a great DIY project.

Do you think this is an instrument, though, or more of a music toy?

The Psychosynth project aims to create an interactive modular soft-synth inspired by the ideas of the Reactable.

Here’s how the Psychosynth creators describe their virtual instrument:

Our main goal is to create a free software alternative to allow newbies, developers and professionals explore new ways of making music. It is also important to build a comunity to ease the comunication between we, software devolopers, and electronic music makers, who can provide insightfull ideas on how to turn new experimental features into usefull and creative tools.

What does the Psychosynth package provide?

• libpsynth: This is a powerful C++ library for the building of synthesis software. It provides, among other things: abstraction over the audio divices of the system, basic audio synthesis classes (oscillators, filters, etc.), a system of connectable synthesis modules with a generic API, classes for the development of interactive synthesizers with features such as automatic module linking, MVC and facade layers, classes for the synchronization of synths over the network using OSC, a framework for easy application creation, etcetera.
• psynth3d: An interactive synth with an look similar to the Reactable’s and a 3D interface which makes use of all the power of libpsynth.
• psynth: A command line version of the synth that can be used as OSC server or client with low resource usage.

This is currently aimed at the developer crowd – only uncompiled source code is available.

If anyone compiles binaries for Windows or Mac, let me know in the comments.

The Reactable, developed by researchers at the Pompeu Fabra University, is a tangible interface for manipulating synth sounds built from an off-the-shelf camera, computer projector, PC, and a custom-built light-table.

The Reactable hardware is based on a translucent, round multitouch surface. The camera beneath the table continuously analyzes the surface, tracking the player’s fingertips and the nature, position, and orientation of physical objects that are distributed on its surface. These objects represent the components of a classic modular synthesizer. The musician can move these objects, changing their distance, orientation, and the relation to each other. These actions directly control the topological structure and parameters of the sound synthesizer. A Sanyo projector, also underneath the table, draws dynamic animations on its surface, providing visual feedback of the state, activity, and main characteristics of the sounds produced by the synthesizer.

The Reactable projects markings onto the surface of the table to make the instrument easy to operate. These confirm to the musician that the object has been recognized and provide additional information regarding the status of the generated tone and its interaction with neighboring objects, allowing the artist to see the connections and a dynamic graphic presentation of the generated sound waves on the table. The musician can change individual sound parameters by touching the projected information with his finger.

After images are captured by the Guppy camera, the images from each Plexiglas object are analyzed and their position and orientation measured. Corresponding sound information is then generated and transferred to the PC’s loud speakers as an audio signal, as well as being graphically projected onto the tabletop.

More at Vision Systems Design.

The reacTable’s developers say it is the latest in an emerging wave of “tangible music interfaces,” but to the touring musicians who play the thing, it’s merely “cool.”

“Established instruments like the Moog, the turntable and the laptop are really powerful, but they do not provide the necessary control over the complex sound generation in the background,” said Martin Kaltenbrunner, one of the four-man team that created the reacTable.

“This is where tangible interfaces or multi-touch surfaces promise some new possibilities. We are interested in creating new electronic musical instruments which are more powerful for the musicians and allow the manipulation of the many possible parameters of synthetic sounds at any point.”

Here’s a video of Björk performing with the reacTable at The Glastonbury Festival:

Björk explains the appeal of the reacTable:

“When I first got it, I thought, ‘Why don’t I just make a funny noise on the Moog?’” said Damian Taylor, a Grammy-nominated producer who engineered Björk’s latest album, Volta, and who plays the reacTable onstage with the Icelander.

“But, as soon as you start to use it, there’s really no comparison — it’s a completely different animal. They designed it so you draw your finger across the board, but I just wound up picking stuff up and banging it on the table and playing it more like rock ‘n’ roll power chords. We had to replace the bottoms of each of the blocks because I was wearing away the patterns.”

via Wired

At the Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference, Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled Microsoft Surface, the first in a new category of surface computing products from Microsoft. Surface turns a tabletop into a dynamic surface that provides interaction with all forms of digital content through gestures, touch and physical objects.

While no musical applications were mentioned in the announcement, Microsoft Surface appears to be a mainstream implementation of technologies pioneered by the Lemur and the Reactable. The potential for music applications could be endless.

Surface is a 30-inch display in a table-like form factor that small groups can use at the same time. The intuitive user interface works without a traditional mouse or keyboard, allowing people to interact with content and information on their own or collaboratively with their friends and families, just like in the real world.

“With Surface, we are creating more intuitive ways for people to interact with technology,” Ballmer said. “We see this as a multibillion dollar category, and we envision a time when surface computing technologies will be pervasive, from tabletops and counters to the hallway mirror. Surface is the first step in realizing that vision.”

Microsoft highlights four key features in their announcment:

• Direct interaction. Users can actually “grab” digital information with their hands, interacting with content by touch and gesture, without the use of a mouse or keyboard.
• Multi-touch. Surface computing recognizes many points of contact simultaneously, not just from one finger like a typical touch-screen, but up to dozens of items at once.
• Multi-user. The horizontal form factor makes it easy for several people to gather around surface computers together, providing a collaborative, face-to-face computing experience.
• Object recognition. Users can place physical objects on the surface to trigger different types of digital responses, including the transfer of digital content.

Robert Moog played an early prototype of the Reactable at the NIME conference 2004 in Hamamatsu, Japan.
It was mainly designed as a toolkit for the rapid development of table-based tangible user interfaces (TUI) and multi-touch interactive surfaces. This framework has been developed by Martin Kaltenbrunner and Ross Bencina  at the Music Technology Group at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain as part of the the reactable project, a novel electro-acoustic music instrument with a tangible user interface.

If that sounds like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo, just check out the videos below:

Basic Demo #1

By moving and relating these objects, representing components of a classic modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sonic topologies, with generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

Basic Demo #2

Improvisation Demo

This instrument is being developed by a team of digital luthiers (Sergi Jordà, Martin Kaltenbrunner, Günter Geiger and Marcos Alonso), at the Music Technology Group within the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain.

via Axehole: Reactable – A Multi-User Electro-Acoustic Instrument