Eine Kleine Tischmusik

The summer I turned 11, I went to a camp for “gifted and talented” students. It was located in the North Carolina mountains, on the campus of Western Carolina University. Camp Cullowhee was an introduction for me, in many ways, to the geek life I would later come to embrace. It was there that I used my first mainframe computer, played my first text adventure game, and uncovered the secrets of an old tone generator. The machine in question looked like a World War II-era telephone switchboard, and it required the operator to spend 20 minutes or so patching cables and tuning dials and switches in order to produce crude tones of various shapes and frequencies. You could make interesting effects with the device; nothing like music. But I did learn quite a bit about square waves and sine waves and filters and so forth.

This experience came flooding back to me when I watched this video of a reactable.

As a computer and music nerd, I find this absolutely fascinating. Not only is the effect mesmerizing, the promise of an affordable computer interface that isn’t a mouse or keyboard is a tantalizing prospect. The original reactable is only partly open source, but Gnomedex 8.0 speaker Arick Lindross has apparently built his own version of the software and will be releasing it to the world soon.

To trip a little further into my childhood memories, our class at camp got the unparalleled privilege of visiting Robert Moog at his home studio. We were given a demo of the then-unknown Fairlight CMI, and, if memory serves, I was prompted to tell Mr. Moog a little about my adventures with the tone generator back on campus. As I watched the videos of the reactable in action, I thought that Moog would have loved it. And, what do you know: there’s a video of Moog himself (~10MB .mov) playing with an early version of the device!