Physical computing sound/audio project

Reactable

I know this project since few years, but I still look at videos about it and look at technicals documentations, because it’s a always a source of inspiration, for a technical and an artistic aspect of it.
I use the same tracking technology to develop few project, and it’s really efficient and playful.

It was the start for me to built interactive installation via those kind of tracking and objects recognition. Later, I moved to infra-red technology and tactiles screens, but it still really interesting to have a material or tangible objet to interact with specificly for a library of sound or videos that are stock in those intermedia objets.

So basicly, you can have a physical artefact that can represent virtual entities or contents, then, it’s become more sensible and relevant to have real matter with the infinite potential of the virtual world.

What is it exactly?

The reactable is a collaborative electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible multi-touch interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving and rotating physical objects on a luminous round table surface. 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.

The instrument was developed by a team of digital luthiers (Sergi Jordà, Martin Kaltenbrunner, Günter Geiger and Marcos Alonso), working in the Music Technology Group within the Audiovisual Institute at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona Spain. Their main activities concentrate on the design of new musical interfaces, such as tangible music instruments and musical applications for mobile devices. The reactable team was recently awarded with various prizes such as the “Ars Electronica Golden Nica”, the “Premi de la Cuitat de Barcelona 2007″ and two “D&AD Yellow Pencils” and the Icelandic singer Björk has successfully used the reactable during her last “Volta” world tour.

By the way I’ve try to print some t-shirts with those “reactable symbols”, to have people as a kind of interactives artefacts, and it’s work very well, it’s become more theatrical and performative.

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