Towards a practical approach to music theory on the reactable

This paper builds upon the existing Reactable musical platform and aims at extending and improving its approach to music theory 1. Sections 1 and 2.2 explain the motivations that led to the development of this proposal from a musical point of view while also giving a music education perspective. In section 2 we'll see a brief survey on tabletop and tangible multi-user systems for audiovisual performance and we'll also briefly introduce the process of implicit learning, we'll formulate a hypothesis about music as a natural language, and describe how the work hereafter presented can help music education. In section 3 we'll describe the current state of the art about music theory on the Reactable, followed by an original proposal about a way to extend and improve it. Finally we'll see how people who had a chance to test the system found it interesting and playful, while also giving important feedback that can be used to improve many practical aspects of the implementation. © 2010 Andrea Franceschini et al.