Reactable

The Reactable is a revolutionary new electronic musical instrument designed to create and perform the music of today and tomorrow. It combines state of the art technologies with a simple and intuitive design, which enables musicians to experiment with sound, change its structure, control its parameters and be creative in a direct and refreshing way, unlike anything you have ever known before.

The Reactable uses a so called tangible interface, where the musician controls the system by manipulating tangible objects. The instrument is based on a translucent and luminous round table, and by putting these pucks on the Reactable surface, by turning them and connecting them to each other, performers can combine different elements like synthesizers, effects, sample loops or control elements in order to create a unique and flexible composition.

As soon as any puck is placed on the surface, it is illuminated and starts to interact with the other neighboring pucks, according to their positions and proximity. These interactions are visible on the table surface which acts as a screen, giving instant feedback about what is currently going on in the Reactable turning music into something visible and tangible.

Additionally, performers can also change the behavior of the objects by touching and interacting with the table surface, and because the Reactable technology is “multi-touch”, there is not limit to the number of fingers that can be used simultaneously. As a matter of fact, the Reactable was specially designed so that it could also be used by several performers at the same time, thus opening up a whole new universe of pedagogical, entertaining and creative possibilities with its collaborative and multi-user capabilities.

Intuitive Interaction

The Reactable works in the most intuitive way we could imagine. For example, if you want to change an oscillator waveform, just draw a new waveform with your finger next to the object you want to modify. Waveforms, envelopes, rhythmic patterns… many things  can be drawn with just the tip of your finger.

Easily Customizable

The Reactable can be easily customized from the same interface, with new sounds and settings in order to adapt it to your own musical style. You can also predefine different compositional scenes, which can be switched on the fly, even in the middle of a performance, with just one simple gesture.

Endless Possibilities

There are more than 40 different objects on the Reactable. Sound generators, samplers and loops, filters and effects, low frequency oscillators or step-pulses… All the objects have different functions and behaviors and they can all be combined with each other, endlessly.

How it works

The way the Reactable works is deeply inspired by modular analogue synthesizers such as those developed by Bob Moog in the early 60s. Reactable’s pucks represent the building blocks of electronic music, each one having a different functionality in sound generation or in effect processing. While in modular synthesizers one typically had to connect these different modules with patch cables in a complex and error-prone process, on the Reactable this is attained in a much easier and intuitive way, since connections between the pucks are managed automatically based on their types and affinities and on the proximity between them. As a result, one can construct any specific setup quickly and on the fly, by simply moving the pucks and bringing them into proximity with each other. Additionally, the resulting sonic flows are represented graphically on the table surface always showing the real waveforms that travel from one object to the other.

The Reactable’s four main groups of modules include sound generators, sound filters or effects, controllers and global objects. The sound generators generate sound that can be changed by the filters. Controllers, which include modules such as low frequency oscillators (LFO) or step-sequencers, can dinamycally modify the behavior of the objects they get connected to, while global objects affect global parameters of the table, such as the beats per minute (BPM), the volume or even the harmonic structure. All of the parameters involved in these processes can be controlled by turning the objects like knobs, as well as by attaching controllers to them.

With its revolutionary new interface, the Reactable turns, for the first time, the complexity behind electronic music creation into something intuitive and easy to understand and easy to handle.

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