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UPF researchers announce to bring the reactable to the market
At this year’s MIDEM conference the reactable was presented as the winner of the “Hottest Music Biz Start-Up Award”. At this occasion Dr. Sergi Jordà announced that before the end of 2008 a newly formed start-up company plans to deliver the award winning musical instrument to the market. The synthesizer with its revolutionary multi-touch interface is currently being used by the Icelandic singer Björk as a key instrument of her "Volta" world tour and now will become available to all potential customers such as professional musicians, sound studios and other music related businesses.
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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 the "Premi de la Cuitat de Barcelona 2007" and the Icelandic singer Björk has been successfully using the reactable during the last year at her current "Volta" world tour.
The reactable intends to be:
- collaborative: several performers (locally or remotely)
- intuitive: zero manual, zero instructions
- sonically challenging and interesting
- learnable and masterable (even for children)
- suitable for novices (installations) and advanced electronic musicians (concerts)
The reactable hardware is based on a translucent, round multi-touch surface. A camera situated beneath the table, continuously analyzes the surface, tracking the player's finger tips 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 players interact by moving 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 projector, also from underneath the table, draws dynamic animations on its surface, providing a visual feedback of the state, the activity and the main characteristics of the sounds produced by the audio synthesizer.