Unveiled and exhibited at the SPOT Festival 2011 in Aarhus, Denmark, Radartable altered the conventional view of what to expect from a self-created musical experience.

Radartable is an interactive table, an audiovisual installation, a musical instrument, and a platform for creative and social interaction. It allows the audience, or participants actually, to express themselves musically, and to collaborate to influence this musical experience. The design of the installation encourages several people to take part at the same time. RadarTable brings people together and motivates them to learn simple functions by watching each other’s activities. The result is a surprisingly varied and cohesive musical production. The users feel that they are playing instruments, but they don’t need any particular qualifications or skills to take part.

The participants have two types of physical blocks at their disposal: cubes and flat cylinders. When a cube is placed on the table, a music loop is played that is linked to the specific tag (graphical pattern) placed face down on the table. Turning the cube clockwise, turns up the volume, and vice versa. The musical content is created so that all the music loops match each other and generate a consistent musical output. The flat cylinders represent sound effects. Placing a cylinder in close vicinity to a cube, the sound effect is applied to the music loop linked to this cube. Several cubes and cylinders can be placed on the table at once, creating a rich musical soundscape.

Musician and producer Henrik Munch composed the musical foundation that comes to life through the doings of the participants around the table. The infinite combinations of cubes af cylinders allow the participants to alter the musical expression in ways never anticipated by the composer, thereby creating a new and unique piece of music.

Radartable is the second iteration of this table. It was designed and developed by CAVI in collaboration with Henrik Munch. The first iteration, DJ Station, was part of a research project and exhibition experiment that aimed to explore how young people, the so-called “Digital Natives”, use, consume, and interact with digital and social media. Yet another version of Radartable, Radartable Images, has been developed for the Images Festival 2013 incorporating audio loops recorded in and inspired from Mali and Syria.

Radartable has been presented to the public at a number of occasions - some of them has been:

SPOT Festival, Aarhus, 2011
Screen Media Expo, London, 2012
Intel Workshop, Science Museum, London, 2012
Infocom, Las Vegas, 2012
Multitouch, Helsinki, 2012
LEGO World, Copenhagen, 2012 and 2013
CHI konference, Paris, 2013
SPOT Interactive Aarhus 2013
Images Festival, Aarhus, 2013