On stage: the reactable and other musical tangibles go real

Abstract

This paper explores one of the application domains in which tangible and tabletop interfaces have currently shown more positive results, studying and unveiling the essential reasons that turn live music performance and tabletop interaction into promising and exiting fields of multi-disciplinary research and experimentation. The paper is structured in three parts. The first one exposes the main reasons that turn live music performance into an ideal test-bed for tangible interaction and advanced human–computer interaction. Reciprocally, the second part studies why tabletop interfaces promise remarkable new musical instruments. The third part describes the main design issues that lead to the development of the reactable, a tabletop musical instrument that has been conceived based on many of the criteria exposed on the previous two parts.