ReacTable Tactile Synth Catches Björk's Eye -- and Ear

August 9, 2007— -- The reacTable, a new instrument that lets musicians manipulate sounds by moving glowing blocks on a round, transparent table, is wowing festival audiences after it was hand-picked by Björk for use on the singer's summer tour.

The modular synthesizer mashes up shades of Tron, laser hockey and classic Moogs using open-source reacTivision software and an under-the-hood camera to track blocks that, when added, rotated or moved, combine to produce beeps, whoops and soaring synth lines.

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."

"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.

A demo clip shows how the reacTable produces music.

"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."

Each block has a different function -- like changing a sound wave's amplitude or acting as a metronome -- that is denoted by a unique hieroglyph. Players move, rotate and flip the blocks, run their fingertips over the tabletop's surface and alter the blocks' proximity to each other to control the music produced by the machine. Pulsing visuals that light up the tabletop come courtesy of a projector beneath the reacTable's translucent Perspex surface, making the instrument interesting to the eyes as well as the ears.

Developed as a Ph.D. project by music technology researchers at Barcelona's Pompeu Fabra University, the instrument -- which looks like a cross between Electroplankton and a Pac-Man cocktail table --