Dr. Martin Kaltenbrunner (*1972) is professor for Tangible Interaction Design, head of the Tangible Music Lab and director of the Postdigital Lutherie master program at the Institute of Media within the University of Arts Linz.
Before his return to Austria he worked as researcher and lecturer at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona as well as further European institutions, such as the MIT Medialab Europe in Dublin. As co-founder of Reactable Systems he had been mainly working on the interaction design concepts behind the electronic musical instrument Reactable, which was awarded with a Golden Nica for Digital Music at the Prix Ars Electronica 2008. This instrument provided the framework for his present artistic-research practice, which is applying tangible interaction design methods towards postdigital lutherie.
He received a Doctorate in Engineering from the Bauhaus-University Weimar, and his technical developments in the field of Tangible User Interfaces have been employed for the realization of numerous artistic and scientific projects.
Projects
metamusic
Publications
A Live-learning Punitive Interface for Improvisational Performance Dynamics
Proceedings of NIME ’26, June 23–26, 2026, London, UK
Mouth Bytes: Prototyping Electronic Musical Instruments Through Embodied, Mouth-Based Interactions
Computers Helping People with Special Needs: 19th International Conference, ICCHP 2026, Brno, Czech Republic, July 15–17, 2026
- Luke Franzke,
- Gerhard Nussbaum,
- Martin Kaltenbrunner,
- 2026
Sinicization of Electronic Music Instruments: Tian Jinqin’s Pioneering Inventions and Designing Ideas
Leonardo Journal, MIT Press
- Enrique Tomás,
- Martin Kaltenbrunner,
- Tian Fangmeng,
- 2026
LOTTO (Localize OTTOsonics): Automated Spatial Speaker Localization Using Tetrahedral Microphone Array
Proceedings of the 22nd Sound and Music Computing Conference (SMC2025), Graz, July 2025, 213-218. Graz, Austria.
- Ben Wesch,
- Manu Mitterhuber,
- Martin Kaltenbrunner,
- 2025
OTTOsonics: Designing and Implementing an Open and Affordable 3D Spatial Audio System
Organised Sound, Cambridge University Press, Issue Spatial Music, 2025
- Manu Mitterhuber,
- Enrique Tomás,
- Martin Kaltenbrunner,
- 2025
Exploring Design Patterns for Spatial Instruments: User-Driven Strategies, Spatialized Synthesis and Loudspeaker Topologies
NIME’24, 4–6 September, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Sonic Interactions - Towards Accessible Digital Music-Making
Computers Helping People with Special Needs: 19th International Conference, ICCHP 2024, Linz, Austria, July 8–12, 2024
- Jens Vetter,
- Martin Kaltenbrunner,
- Erich Schmid,
- 2024
Interactive spatial audio diffusion: The pendulum haptic interface prototype
11th Machine Intelligence and Digital Interaction MIDI Conference
- Pavel Husa,
- Vojtech Leischner,
- Martin Kaltenbrunner,
- Enrique Tomás,
- 2023
Embodied Gestures
TU Wien Academic Press
- Enrique Tomás,
- Thomas Gorbach,
- Hilda Tellioglu,
- Martin Kaltenbrunner,
- 2022
Embodied Gestures: Sculpting Energy-Motion Models into Musical Interfaces.
21st International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME 21)
- Enrique Tomás,
- Thomas Gorbach,
- Hilda Tellioglu,
- Martin Kaltenbrunner,
- 2021
The Design of Musical Instruments for Grey Parrots: An Artistic Contribution toward Auditory Enrichment in the Context of ACI
MDPI Journal on "Multimodal Technologies and Interaction", Special Issue on "Animal Centered Computing: Enriching the Lives of Animals"
Animal-Centred Sonic Interaction Design: Musical Instruments and Interfaces for Grey Parrots
ACI 2019 : Sixth International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction, Haifa, Israel
Material Embodiments of Electroacoustic Music: An Experimental Workshop Study
19th International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME19), Porto Alegre, Brazil
- Enrique Tomás,
- Thomas Gorbach,
- Hilda Tellioglu,
- Martin Kaltenbrunner,
- 2019
Sound Shifting: From Soundscape to Soundshape
TEI 2019: 13th Int.Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction Tempe, USA
- Reinhard Gupfinger,
- Martin Kaltenbrunner,
- LuiseWolf,
- 2019