Via Music thing (be sure to read the comments, in which they sort out what it actually is), here’s another multi-touch music table built on freely-available tools:
Quite a lot of tools have been connected to make this happen, but they’re all out there so you could do something similar. Let’s see if I can get this right: the software is a collaboration of two projects that resulted in the multi-touch loopArena MTC, for making music interactively. loopArena itself was built in the free, Java-based Processing, originally with MIDI support via the ProMIDI library but now evidently using OpenSoundControl. The graphics library libAVG (“picking up where Director left off”) does the tracking, though there’s also a link to the free multi-touch library Touchlib.
And, long story short, here’s what you get:
YouTube readers sum it up best: “air hockey is cool again” … “this is the real future voodoo.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.
More fun than organizing your digital photos in a hotel lobby, huh?
It’s interesting to me, though, that after all this work, you don’t necessarily get a different kind of music — just a different way of making it. And there seem to be two major directions in interface. On one end of the spectrum, there are glitzy, complex interfaces with sophisticated hardware. On the other end, we have increasing interest in minimalism, like the grid of buttons on the Monome, retro-styled software interfaces in trackers on computers and game systems, and, at some point, just a desire to take that KAOSS Pad and MacBook and MIDI keyboard and just practice making music rather than worrying about interface. I actually thing these seemingly divergent threads may all lead back to the same places in the end, and don’t know that they’re even incompatible — but, “ooh, aah” factor aside, it’s fun to watch them spinning themselves out.
If this makes one thing abundantly clear, though, it’s that even though Microsoft has an easier time getting on the Today Show, they by no means have a monopoly on experimenting with these kinds of interfaces.
Got more resources for building your own tools? Diagrams, software libraries, code, blogs about how yours didn’t quite work, blog about how awesome yours is? Let us know!
It's a WILD design … and all the circles that float around look pretty cool, but it seems to be a little distracting, for me at least. I can't help but wonder what their purpose is …
It definitely seems like it takes a different approach, compared to the Lemur. I wonder if there's some KAOSS like effects that you can do. I also wonder if the Lemur features something like that as well … I want one of those soooo freaking bad.
how do u build ur own? hmmm dont u wounder the samething
[…] Jag tror det finns (minst) tre problem i dagsläget: 1) dålig uppdateringsfrekvens/lagg, 2) låg upplösning på så det är svårt att pricka vad man ska klicka på om det är gränssnitt med små knappar (tex Reason eller Live med hyfsat hög upplösning), 3) alla program är gjorda med tanke på att man ska använda möss, så man får problem både med storleken på knappar och sånt (se #2) och sånt som att fingrarna skymmer det som är under handen – det är ingen slump att iPhone och liknande apparater har ikonraderna längst ned på skärmen istället för längst upp. …plus att det är multitouch man vill ha, och det finns såvitt jag vet inte på någon tablet-PC än. Och jag misstänker att man vill ha specialskrivna gränssnitt för att dra nytta av petskärmar för musik. […]
[…] shop TheProduct*, commissioned by Humboldt University Berlin. We saw TheProduct*’s terrific musical multi-touch table way back in 2007 on Create Digital […]
[…] shop TheProduct*, commissioned by Humboldt University Berlin. We saw TheProduct*’s terrific musical multi-touch table way back in 2007 on Create Digital […]