Interaction With Music -- Is Multitouch The Future?

Music Production for the last couple of decades has for the most part been a digital affair. Even more so now days is this the case, with software becoming the norm in most music studios as they slowly do away with their expensive hardware counterparts. Gone are the good old days of the whole music making process, at least for electronic musicians, being an entirely hardware affair. In my days of surfing forums I have learnt a little about what the shift from analog hardware to digital hardware to software has meant to electronic musicians. Not only are people missing the perceived positive aspects of the 'analogue sound' such as 'warmth' but they are missing the physicality of having a piece of hardware to react with and to feel. So, to fill this void people have been working on exciting concepts to control the software. Besides the normal midi controllers and trigger pads some innovations have emerged as what i think could quite possibly be the future of music making for electronic musicians..... Multi-touch!!

Multi-touch isn't a new thing, corporate and defence sectors have been using it for a while... but only in the last couple of years has it become a reality for musicians

The first Multi-touch interface i stumbled upon was the Lemur designed by a company called Jazzmutant whose multi-touch interface brought control possibilities beyond the X-Y axis, it became a popular performance tool alongside programs such as Cycling 74's Max/MSP


Further developments have been the Reactable (left) which brought Multi-touch surfaces to another level. It's designed to be used not just as a control surface but as a modular synthesis platform in which one places blocks representing modules on a table top surface to construct a modular synthesis environment. The Reactable has been recently popularised due to its prominence in Björk's recent performances...



(Above) A Demonstration of the Reactable

Furthermore, It was as recent as last week that the well known company Microsoft released a Table top Multi-touch computer called Surface, not designed specifically for audio, but for the entire home media centre and computer. This could well be the way of the future...

All in all, this is not only an exciting technological development because it replaces the physicality that was lost when we switch to software... but because it could completely revolutionize the way we sequence, create and perform electronic music.

Sticky beak