In recent years we have seen a proliferation of musical tables. Believing that this is not just the result of a tabletop trend, in this paper we first discuss several of the reasons for which live music performance and HCI in general, and musical instruments and tabletop interfaces in particular, can lead to a fertile two-way cross-pollination that can equally benefit both fields. After that, we present the reacTable, a musical instrument based on a tabletop interface that exemplifies several of these potential achievements.

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Music instruments are used to play and to produce music, transforming the actions of one or more performers into sound. This article explores some instrument design issues in three distinct parts. The first section attempts to define what music instruments are, how traditional instruments function and what they can do, and what future instruments could be, trying to figure out how we could better exploit their unlimited potential. The second section proposes a quick review of the different know-how, the technical and the conceptual frameworks and areas in which new instrument designers and researchers are currently working on. It is not in that sense, a survey of new instruments and controllers but more a survey of thoughts and knowledge about them. The third and last section studies the dynamic relation that builds between the player and the instrument, introducing concepts such as efficiency, apprenticeship and learning curve. It explores some music instruments generic properties such as the diversity, the variability or the reproducibility of their musical output, the linearity or non-linearity of their behavior, and tries to figure out how these aspects can bias the relation between the instrument and its player, and how they may relate to more commonly studied and (ab)used concepts such as expressivity or virtuosity. The aim of this paper is the foundation of a theoretical framework in which the possibilities and the diversity of music instruments as well as the possibilities and the expressive freedom of human music performers could all be evaluated; a framework that could help to figure out what the essentials needs for different types of musicians-from the absolute novice to t he professional or the virtuoso-may be.

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The reacTable* is a novel multi-user electro-acoustic musical instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. In this paper we will focus on the various collaborative aspects of this new instrument as well as on some of the related technical details such as the networking infrastructure. The instrument can be played both in local and remote collaborative scenarios and was designed from the very beginning to serve as a musical instrument for several simultaneous players.