Interactive Sound-Mediating Table
A playful, ambiguous table that turns bare-skin touch between two people into sound and light.
- No.
- 04
- Year
- 2024
- Medium
- Tangible interaction
- Role
- Co-designer, one of four authors
- Where
- Chalmers University of Technology; exhibited at ACM DIS 2024, Copenhagen
- Worked with
- David Hagberg, Mafalda Gamboa and Sjoerd Hendriks
- Status
- Published, ACM DIS 2024
- What it is
- A table that turns touch between two people into sound and light, with seven states from three coloured points.
- What we tested
- 13 pairs of students, five minutes each. Understanding it took between 5 and 45 seconds.
The idea
We wanted an object that gives two people a playful excuse to touch, and then answers them. It began as a variant of Undertable, a table we had tried ourselves in a study at Chalmers, where touching two brass strips set off fans hidden underneath. We swapped airflow for sound and light, and kept what made it work: enough ambiguity that you have to figure it out together.
It builds on Hobye and Löwgren’s idea of bare-skin touch: giving strangers a playful excuse to touch, mediated through an object. The patterns on the tabletop and the idea of using it as a pair came from Crdl, a touch-sensitive instrument that lets people with dementia and their families communicate through sound and touch.
How it works
Three discreet touch points, green, red and blue, sit on each side of the table. When two people each touch a point and touch each other, they close a circuit and trigger a melody with matching light. Seven states come out of the possible colour combinations, so the table stays open to interpretation rather than teaching one correct way to play it.
Touch closes a circuit read by an Arduino Uno, which sends MIDI to a KORG Volca Keys synthesizer, and an LED strip lights up in the colour of the point that was touched. One of the states was built to relax, drawing on research into how natural sounds reduce stress, because people talk more easily when they are at ease.
A and B: first we tested conductive paint as a touch surface, and tried light and sound on the bench: an LED strip, and the KORG Volca Keys driven over MIDI.
C and D: a mini-size table to prototype the touch responses with the Arduino, then the real tabletop, painted and put on legs.
E and F: the electronics wired in under the painted patterns and their touch points, then the finished table in the evaluation, lit from underneath.
What we saw
We tested it with 13 pairs of students, five uninterrupted minutes each, then an interview. Understanding the table took anywhere from five to forty-five seconds. Then they got inventive: fingers and hands, ankle to ankle, forehead to forehead, and some tried to make a song together, and one reading of the table was as a DJ’s soundboard.
Leaning over the table to try another way of touching.
Palm to palm, each keeping a hand on a point.
Surprise, the moment the table answered.
Knuckle to knuckle, the light gone blue.
People gave the colours their own meanings. One said blue “feels a bit spooky”, and green “feels Japanese, like sitting and drinking tea”. A few noticed they could technically trigger it alone, and found that “boring”, as if cheating the system. That suits a table built to need two people.
At ACM DIS 2024
In July 2024 the table went to the demo track of ACM DIS 2024 in Copenhagen, where visitors tried it too, sometimes three at once, forming a longer circuit.
What I’d take from it
Ambiguity is a dial, not a switch: some pairs couldn’t tell the melodies apart, and some were bored fairly quickly, so the next version needs more distinct sounds and more to find. And the table only knew whether two people touched, not how. The richest part of what people did, the way they touched, was invisible to it, and that’s where I’d look next.