The Audiopad is a musical composition and performance instrument which tracks the positions of objects on a tabletop surface and converts their motion into music. The system, which is powered by Debian Linux, combines a set of electronically tagged objects on a tabletop… surface, a matrix of antenna elements to track the objects, and an LCD projector to display an animated user interface.

The Audiopad software was developed in the Python scripting language, and uses some C and C++ for low-level tracking code. The fluidly-animated graphics are displayed using OpenGL, and MIDI is used to talk to the synthesizer.

The Audiopad was developed by MIT PhD students James Patten and Ben Recht.

[Thanks to Bill Kendrick for this story.]

 
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