Touching Cloth

I have been keeping an eye on the multitouch community over the last year or so...a bunch of tech heads, with carpentary skills, building rather nice coffee tables with touch screens in. If you have ever seen a Microsoft Surface, thats the thing that these guys are making at a fraction of the £14,000 price tag.

A few people build walls, and this is what I have been interested in. Some people are building walls to play with sound. And some people are doing it jaw droppingly well, like SubCycle (http://www.subcycle.org/).

It is clear to me that Christian Bannister there is a producer who has been comprehensively beaten to within an inch of his life with the talent stick, not to mention his Einstein like noggin-power. I know just enough about this sort of thing to know that with time and a little budget, I could have a crack at something similar.

The ultimate aim is not for something quite like Subcycle. For a start, I just can't see us getting something THAT good. Secondly, our music is different and will require different instruments, and lastly I really want to explore the idea of having the graphics (and physics) themselves generate sound and control it, not necesarily needing your touch, your intercation would just 'stir' it.

So, I bought some surfaces and blew some money on cameras which i fiddled with and tested and reconfigured and tested again, then binned, and bought new cameras and infrared lamps and new surfaces, until I found some kit that worked. I wrote a few basic graphical instruments using Processing (in Java). But again, unlike Subcycle, my aim is to have a system that is very portable (so we can gig with it) and uses Ableton Live. the aim is to create a highly configurable 'kit' of graphical instruments to manipulate that I can reuse with ableton in many different combinations, for different sounds and tunes.

So, this is the discovery phase. Its been time consuming and a massive learning curve. But the moment when I put my finger to the surface and played with light was freakishly entoxicating.

Next I need a name for it. Anyone?

Dom