On the surface, this appeared to be a forum about collaboration. Out of 6 speakers only 1 managed to tie in her shameless product plugging with any real advice…and anyway, I don’t think we were there to learn about collaboration at all, I think we just wanted to hear Mr Audiomulch speak his bit (and to witness awesome robot origami flowers).

Our Audio Mulch man was attempting to collaborate music and technology (not really such a radical idea really as instrument makers have been doing this since the first musical bows *footnote 1*). He wanted to create software that could augment sound in real time (IE a live performance orientated synthesizor)…the result…Audiomulch (a project which, incidentally, required collaborative efforts with 30 software engineers to get off the ground).

After the AudioMulch project, he became a collaborator in a much more ambitious music tech instrument design project….The ReacTable (apparently these won’t be
released for the mainstream any time soon because there is no market for them. PFFFFFFT!)

This instrument is a collaborative effort realised by people with a diverse range of skills. It is essentially a synthesizor but, every parametre is controlled by placing/removing and manipulating specialized objects on a big, flat, blue, round thing (I later found out that the ReacTable (probably) “sees” the objects courtesy of a scanner *footnote 2*). Even in it’s finalised form, used as a live performance instrument, the music produced by ReacTable benefits from team work.


1) David Moss – 2001 Victor Folk Festival
2) My mate Luc about 2 weeks ago