When I saw Björk at this year's Glastonbury Festival, it wasn't so much her ice-demonic-sprite music which enthralled me so much - although she was one of my musical highlights that mud-soaked weekend - it was actually one of her bandmates using what I thought at the time was a Microsoft Surface table onstage, creating some of the weirdest synth-led music since Aphex Twin first picked up a laptop.
Damian Taylor, the Grammy-nominated producer who worked on her latest album, Volta, was actually playing the reacTable, "a state-of-the-art multi-user electro-acoustic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface", which we first wrote about last November. Wired have a great article up at the moment about the reacTable, interviewing Taylor about his experiences working on Volta and using the device.
It was actually developed for a Ph.D project by several music technology researchers at Barcelona's Pompeu Fabra University, and whilst not available to the general public at the moment, there are plans to bring it out soon. Apparently the developers of the reacTable had imagined it being played gently by up to four players, but Taylor has described how he "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."
The sounds are manipulated using glowing blocks on the transparent table, with each block posessing a different function. Users can then rotate, flip and move the blocks around the table, plus use their fingertips and other objects to get even more of an abstract sound. Check out the video here of Björk performing onstage at Glastonbury Festival with Taylor using the reacTable, for her song 'Pluto'.
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