Tunes on the table

The Music Table is an augmented reality system for composing music by manipulating objects on a tabletop as a physicalized representation of the music being heard. Educational theory, and the apparent success of related applications in various learning contexts, seems to support this idea. In our experiments with children, all were able to make a musical pattern and made many changes to their pattern over a short period of time. We propose its suitability as an educational tool, particularly in short and intense interactive learning situations such as children's museums. We discuss some future developments of the idea. Rodney Berry was born in 1963 in Australia. He came to ATR in 1999. He is musician, composer and media artist, he gained a Master of fine arts from the UNSW college of Fine Arts in Sydney in 1999. He is currently completing a Ph.D. at UTS Creativity and Cognition Studios in Sydney while continuing to work at ATR. Mao Makino was born in Osaka, graduated from School of Literature, Arts and Cultural Studies. She has been a Media Creator at ATR since 1999. Her 3D animations featured in the MIDAS interactive dance system shown at the exhibition “Dream Technologies for the 21st Century” in Tokyo in 2000. Naoto Hikawa was born in Sendai. He graduated in “Visual concept planning” from Osaka University of the Arts. Since 1998, he has been a media creator with ATR. He was also involved in the production of ATR MIC lab's MIDAS dance system. He is also a VJ at nightclubs in Osaka. Dr Masami Suzuki was born in Tokyo, Japan. He obtained Master degree from Keio University in 1980, since then has worked for KDD (currently KDDI) telecommunication company. His research area has been spread from natural language processing to creative human interfaces. Currently, he is a chief researcher at ATR Media Information Science Laboratories. Dr. Naomi Inoue was born in Nara, Japan. He gained Master degree and Ph.D. from Kyoto University in 1984 and 1998, respectively. His research interests are natural language processing, speech recognition and graphics user interface for mobile phones. Currently, he is a group leader at ATR Media Information Science Laboratories.