Coolest musical instrument ever made

“The Reactable” is a cross between a theremin, a synthesiser, and a projector, and it’s quite possibly the coolest instrument ever made. To hell with hippy-lite trustafarians sat round a campfire tawnging Jack Johnson covers on a £20 guitar, whip one of these bad boys out and you’ll be the toast of the party.

Their website states, somewhat incomprehensibly:

The reactable is a multi-user electro-acoustic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical artefacts on the table surface and constructing different audio topologies in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

Ha, right, whatever guys. Essentially, by placing objects on a table, sound is created. Rotate the objects, move them about, add more, rearrange them, and the sounds change. Actions speak louder than words anyway, so take a look at this awesome footage of the Reactable in action.

4 comments April 11th, 2007