MAIn is part of the Music Technology Group (MTG) at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain). Its line of research started with our interest in studying musical performance and in developing interfaces for the real-time creation and exploration of music. Through the years we have approached this problem from different perspectives such as collective musical creation or developing a framework for the conception and design of new musical instruments. An interesting result of these studies was the development of the Reactable, an electronic music instrument that combines a tangible tabletop interface with concepts or techniques such as modular synthesis, visual programming and visual feedback.
Currently, we focus our research on tabletop and tangible interaction, studying how these type of interfaces can favor multi-dimensional and continuous real-time interaction, exploration and multi-user collaboration, thus expanding our areas of interest beyond the musical performance domain. Some of the topics we are exploring include edutainment, children, elder people and special education; complex interactive situations, exploratory and expressive activities; creative collaboration through effective emotional communication, and extending surface computing interaction beyond the surface. For some of these projects we collaborate with specialists from other fields, such as artificial intelligence, cognitive science and neuroscience, sociology and education.