Ever since the first musical instruments were built musical composition has been inextricably linked to the technological advances of the time. From the pianoforte to the modern computer 300 years later. Will Microsoft's Windows 7 offer another step forward for musicians with the inclusion of multi-touch?
Multi-Touch History
Multi-touch technology was originally conceived and engineered by Bell Labs in 1984. Throughout the 90s a few companies began to explore the idea further, including familiar concepts such as dragging and pinching. One company, Fingerworks even began to manufacture multi-touch products. They were acquired by Apple in 2005.
While largely responsible for its popularisation, Apple were not the first big company to experiment with multi-touch technology. Microsoft had been working on their multi-touch Surface computer since 2001. The tabletop computer uses cameras rather than finger pressure to sense movement and has the unique ability to interact with physical objects on its surface in new, interesting and ultimately, hopefully, more practical ways.
Multi-touch for Musicians
What does this mean for musicians? It's possible that little will change. However if musicians decide to replace their monitors with touch screens and lay them flat on their desk things might get interesting. Software companies would need to oblige by making more touch-friendly interfaces, although many audio sequencers have basic mixing, transport and eq controls already friendly enough if used with a decent sized screen.
French company JazzMutant currently make a number of touch-screen products designed to control music sequencers such as their Dexter multi-touch controller. Its intuitively designed interface is smooth but it's an expensive solution, with a relatively small screen and compatible with a limited range of sequencers. A whole Operating System utilising multi-touch should provide a lot more flexibility, and affordability.
Musical Possibilities
While the touch-screen may not replace the hardware keyboard, multi-touch does make a lot of tasks easier to achieve than with a mouse. For example, the ability to control multiple faders at once using all fingers. Doing this with a mouse requires the individual selection and grouping of the faders first. The same is true with controlling more than one synth parameter at a time.
Many possibilities won't be realised immediately. Given many musicians' affinity with hardware controllers, the application of physical objects interacting with sensitive touch-screens seems most interesting. Imagine a coffee cup controlling cut-off frequency while the curved shape of a piece of string dictates a melodic passage. A whole composition might be built on a touch-screen surface by the arrangement of physical objects which control different musical variables.
It may be that elements of randomness and accidental creativity sneak back into the art of digital recording, simply through our interaction with multi-touch screens. Where did that cool sound just come from? Hey, someone spilt their coffee on the touch-screen.
