Martin Kaltenbrunner: tangible user interfaces

PUBLIC LECTURE

Tangible Musical Interfaces have become an emerging paradigm for the design of electronic musical instruments. In his presentation Martin Kaltenbrunner will introduce the basic concepts of tangible interaction and briefly discuss the history of electronic music leading to the development of novel controllers and musical artefacts, which intend to overcome the limitations of the laptop as primary tool for contemporary electronic music practice. Along with several unique instrument examples from the past decade, the presentation will also provide a perspective on the development of the Reactable and its fundamental concepts, including a hands-on demonstration of the instrument.

Martin Kaltenbrunner is Professor at the Interface Culture Lab at the University of Art and Design in Linz. Before his return to Austria he worked as researcher and lecturer at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, at the MIT Medialab Europe in Dublin, as well as further European universities. As co-founder of Reactable Systems he had been mainly responsible for the interaction design concepts behind the Reactable, which has been successfully introduced by renowned artists such as Björk. The instrument has been shown at several international media art and music festivals, and was awarded with the Golden Nica for Digital Music, two D&AD Yellow Pencils and the Prize of the City of Barcelona. Kaltenbrunner publishes in the context of human computer interaction conferences and his influential research on tangible interface tools has been employed for the realization of numerous artistic and scientific projects in that area.