MTCF : A Framework for Designing and Coding Musical Tabletop Applications Directly in Pure Data

In the past decade we have seen a growing presence of tabletop systems applied to music, lately with even some products becoming commercially available and being used byprofessional musicians in concerts. The development of thistype of applications requires several demanding technicalexpertises such as input processing, graphical design, realtime sound generation or interaction design, and because ofthis complexity they are usually developed by a multidisciplinary group.In this paper we present the Musical Tabletop CodingFramework (MTCF) a framework for designing and codingmusical tabletop applications by using the graphical programming language for digital sound processing Pure Data(Pd). With this framework we try to simplify the creationprocess of such type of interfaces, by removing the need ofany programming skills other than those of Pd.