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TouchTones: multi-user collaborative music composer

Published: 23 November 2009 Publication History

Abstract

TouchTones lets up to four people create music collaboratively on Microsoft Surface. You don't need to know anything about music to make something that sounds beautiful. Start an instrument playing by touching a colored spinner, change the arrow directions on the grid to change the melody, and that's about it! TouchTones provides an immediate and enjoyable musical experience for any small group. TouchTones can be learned with only a few seconds of exploration or by viewing its integrated help video. From there, additional features emerge through play. Create tricky melody paths through the note grid, or use multiple fingers and play TouchTones like a keyboard. Tested with users from age 4 to age 60, TouchTones opens up either minutes or hours of enjoyment, for as few as one user or even a whole family. Touchtones is a collaborative, multi-touch, multi-user, grid-based music sequencer that is being released as freeware for Microsoft Surface. It has four instruments distributed across four octaves, all playing to a master tempo. Sounds can be triggered by user-controlled animated "sprites" or by simply pressing a colored button and pressing one of the icons on the grid at the same time. The patterns on the grid produce melody, and anyone can alter the melody, even while it's playing. Volume and reset controls help to round out the simple and wholly visual user interface. While TouchTones comes with a clean, modern design and a set of pleasant sounds, it has been designed to be reskinnable. Both the sounds and visuals can be completely customized to match any brand, mood, or theme.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      ITS '09: Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces
      November 2009
      240 pages
      ISBN:9781605587332
      DOI:10.1145/1731903
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 23 November 2009

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