Eat your heart out, Microsoft Surface! Musicians are taking up interactive tables as new ways of making their creations physically accessible, so listeners can reach out and touch the work.

Etiquette is a new interactive installation at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, featuring a light box on which musical elements can be manipulated by moving around blocks. It uses the same underlying library that was developed for the ReacTable synth, currently made famous by its use on Bjork’s tour.

But what’s nice about the Etiquette is — surprise — the music. Rather than predictable electronic sounds, Etiquette echoes and vibrates with laptop-sampled acoustic timbres, such as stand-up bass, banjo, brass, flute, and even glockenspiel. It’s still digital music: fragments of music are reconceived in the digital world, overlapping into an ambient landscape. But the common criticism of installation art — that you wouldn’t want to sit and listen to the music produced — is answered here. Etiquette is available as a downloadable Creative Commons-licensed four-track album. I just sat and listened to it, and was quite happy! It’s real music played by real musicians that seems perfectly suited to its interactive counterpart; the free-flowing form of the music is ideal for rearranging in an installation. (In somewhat less interactive form, I expect I may have it on repeat here in my studio on and off for the next few days!)

Everything was produced on-location: many of the materials themselves were found on site, and recordings were made around the workshop.

The project is a collaboration between musicians and technologists: the band FOUND worked with computer scientist (and CDM reader) Simon Kirby.

Simon writes in with additional details of the setup, which features Ableton Live, Max/MSP, and the ReacTIVision library:

Those zany, wonderful YouTubers. A YouTube post in April challenged YouTubers to show off home-built instruments:

And there’s a terrific lineup of responses, like this performance on Tupperware musical instruments, by Adachi Tomomi:

Video is a natural medium, after all, for showing off DIY instruments. Now, if only we could start doing this on a service with less craptacular video quality. Blip.tv or Revver or Vimeo, anyone? (I’d love to start a CDM group, but we’d need to pick a service first. So far, I’ve been really impressed by Blip, as used by the folks at Make.)

… as seen via Beepglitch, who points out some faves.

Sometimes an instrument you know can become something else altogether. Bob Collier has been constructing his own thumb pianos, adding amplification, effects, self-sampling features, and novel cases involving recycled camera bodies and faux fur. As Bob says, “Sometimes the crudest and roughest looking kalimbas can sound surprisingly good especially with the right context of fx and
amplification.”

I find kalimbas beautiful and delicate to begin with. Throw in some faux fur and Korg KAOSS Pad effects, and they take on a whole new life:

Other designs add all-new functionality, like the Sampimer, a “self-sampling” thumb piano with integrated 20-second voice recorder, a speaker covered by a lens cap, and a body made out of a jewelry caddy:

I asked Bob a bit more about the designs, and out came still more ingenious re-adaptations of the lowly kalimba. He explains how he got started with this series in the first place:

Are game music themes becoming the new equivalent of the old jazz standards? Maybe, as game covers are going from novelty to meme. Matrix of Matrixsynth sends along this YouTube find. Yes, you can get any timbre you want out of a guitar; nice violin effects, as well. (Now we only need a “Give the Children Some Tripods” fund.) And, in the bizarre world of YouTube, this is only one of many Halo theme song covers:

Say hi to this quartet over on MySpace. Sorry to Mac users who like me remember hearing this theme for the first time at Macworld Expo. How’d that all end, again? (Get your revenge by running Halo 2 under Vista in Boot Camp. Then play Myth.)

Aside from introducing me to the magic of arithmetic (I’ve been away from Sesame Street far too long), our eagle-eyed readers note that Kotaku has interviewed the violinist, Hanah Stuart. Or, anyway, there’s an extended crush-fest that you might call an interview:

That adorable, auburn-haired sprite with the exposed milky calves, hugging her violin? That’s Hanah Stuart… teenage girl, classical violinist, and the pixy who casually pranced upon a high school auditorium stage and rocked the Halo 2 theme song so hard that Steve Vai started spitting up bloody chunks of lung.

There’s nothing like a Gawker blog journalist in love. Now, before I have to re-take Kindergarten, I’m out for the holidays. See you soon.