Fox in the Box is a modular MIDI/OSC Controller specifically developed for collaborative Live-Performance of electronic music. A musical piece is represented by little boxes, each one of them controlling one individual part of the compostion. These parts can be switched on and off by tilting the boxes. Additionally, a set of sound modifiers is available through little sensoric devices which act as sound effects controlled by a specific input gesture a user can perform on the pad.

This project has gone through a process of multiple revisions during a period of two years in which we were constantly improving the amount of possible interactions with the music aswell as the formal aspects and usability of the objects.

A first prototype resulted from a collaboration with Native Instruments, a Berlin based company for music software, with which we sketched out the basic concept with the use of a custom built software instrument using Reaktor.

The second revision of Fox in the Box was presented at the Ars Electronica in Linz, 2007. This prototype was realized using Arduino Hardware Boards with Bluetooth functionality and custom Java software controlling Ableton’s Live software over MIDI.

For the third revision we have collaborated with Hexagram Institute for Research/Creation in Media Arts and Technologies in Montreal, Canada by using their Sense/Stage boards, a small custom designed sensor hardware board and software infrastructure. Based on this technology we were able to incorporate more sophisticated sensory and feedback through light into the system. Additionally we were able to tie Fox in the Box much more closely into the audio software via
Live’s API. This way we achieved a better experience by providing more fine-grained control of how each object represents parts of the composition.