Extending expression, learning, and health through innovations in musical composition, performance, and participation

muStick is a tribal instrument turned digital. It is a simple stick to which sensors are attached. They detect the thumping of the stick ag…

This project explores the contribution of advanced audio systems to live performance, their design and construction, and their integration …

The scientific community is making marked progress in the area of Alzheimer's disease (AD) treatment: memory-related pharmaceuticals are av…

The Powers Sensor Chair gives visitors a special glimpse into Tod Machover�s robotic opera "Death and the Powers," by providing a new way t…

Stage performances present many challenges and opportunities in the field of robotics. Here we create a family of furniture robots that loo…

Expert or fraud, the powerful person in front of an orchestra or choir attracts both hate and admiration. But what is the actual influence …

Skellig is an opera with music by Tod Machover and a libretto based on the best-selling novel for young people by David Almond. It premiere…

Coda is a collaborative musical-knowledge database in which articles are accessed by selecting graphic entities in a musical score. Coda is…

Bibliodoptera is an installation commissioned for the MIT 150th Anniversary Celebration FAST Festival of Art, Science, and Technology. A cl…

The Hyperinstruments group is exploring new ways to visualize music both at the song-level and the collection-level. At song-level: SoundSi…

With CogNotes, new music composition tools become platforms for cognitive assessment. CogNotes users engage their memory as they emerge as …

SoundStrand is a music composition toy. It comprises a set of building blocks, each containing a musical motif. The blocks can be connected…

Dance is an expressive activity that combines music and movement. We are interested in both encouraging people to dance, and in measuring t…

Cicadence is an interactive soundscape. Created through a bio-mimetic process, it examines and is inspired by the auditory experience produ…

Syncwalk is a platform for sound design in a geographic space: you place songs from your music library onto a map, and then you go out into…

Both professional and hobbyist musicians rely heavily on their computers to make music, and usually find themselves with hard drives full o…

Our work in Music, Mind, and Health has culminated in a recent PhD thesis, showing the technologies and perspectives required to build on t…

Beginning in the early twentieth century, composition branched out into a variety of new representations, the most common being the graphic…

Rumble is an ambient notification platform to help you learn the locations of invisible urban infrastructures. Some example infrastructures…

The Trainer Piano actively moves your fingers as you learn how to play. Employing active magnetic force below the keys of a working piano, …

We are developing a multimodal interface for hand rehabilitation following stroke. EMG forearm sensors read attempted finger presses in dis…

How do people perceive the way music can convey a story or a feeling, tension and resolution in music, and musical structures? In order to …

The Chandelier is a large-scale robotic musical instrument that is being developed for "Death and the Powers." Its 48 strings can be actuat…

Spheres and Splinters is a new work composed by Tod Machover for hypercello, electronics, and responsive visuals commissioned fo Faster tha…

Robots and performers make beautiful music together. The opera "Death and the Powers" features a chorus of seven-foot tall, autonomous, pol…

Personal Opera is a radically innovative creative environment that enables anyone to create musical masterpieces sharing personal thoughts,…

SoundSieve is an exciting new way to look at the structure of music, designed to create a visual �fingerprint that can provide the listener…

There have been few studies of bowing data from real players, in part due to the difficulty in capturing this information. We have designed…

MusicBox focuses on the problem of navigating a large body of music. It aims to help you find music you like, both inside your own collect…

It has become increasingly common for new dance theater works to combine the movement of live dancers with the movement of computer-generat…

How can we encourage people to express themselves in new ways? And how do people deal with objects that possess (presumed) agency? These t…

We are studying and implementing a swarm of 36 holonomic-drive robots for use in an upcoming robotic opera. Each robot will eventually comp…

Jeux Deux is an interactive concerto for Hyperpiano, Orchestra, and Live Computer Images. Utilizing novel software, Jeux Deux allows a vir…

The Rehab Sound Sculptor is a motion-tracking interface that allows the researcher to quickly map a subject's movement to any aspect of sou…

That people have emotional responses to music is a truism. However, we have little understanding of the ways in which music brings about th…

In the EME project we worked with a quadraplegic individual with severe cerebral palsy to develop the hardware and software necessary for a…

By coupling damped semi-acoustic physical objects with virtual percussion acoustics, we have developed highly controllable hybrid digital/a…

"Loops" combines the work of the Lab's Synthetic Characters group, Merce Cunningham, and digital artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar. A …

Audio recordings are an archive of a performance. As an archive, they cannot be changed; they embody certain choices on the part of the pe…

Toy Symphony combines children, virtuosic soloists, composers, and symphony orchestras around the world to alter radically how children are…

Gestures [Natasha Sinha and Hugo Sol�s] is composed for six Music Shapers, two trumpets, two trombones, two violas, and one double bass. In…

The Beatbugs are handheld rhythm instruments that allow creation, manipulation, and sharing of rhythmic motives through a simple interface.…

This research examines the use of new music technologies as clinical interventions for individuals with autistic spectrum disorders. The te…

For the 42nd annual Bachman's/Marshall Field's flower show, we worked with landscape designer Julie Messervy and the production team from M…

The vinylMP3 project brings together new digital technology with old vintage analog technology. It was designed to look, sound, and behave …

Pitcher is an efficient and flexible real-time software-based pitch shifter. It goes well beyond an octave shift with no strong timbre arti…

Many researchers have considered probabilistic models of music structure representation. However, these models have yet to provide a truly …

The Music Shapers are soft, squeezable instruments that allow players to shape and explore musical compositions. Using capacitive sensing a…

The Drum Network provides players with a collaborative playing experience where participants can manipulate, share, and shape each others' …

The Brain Opera is an attempt to bring expression and creativity to everyone, in public or at home, by combining an exceptionally large num…

An interconnected musical network for a museum setting, Voice Patterns allows for up to four participants to create and transform musical m…

This project creates a synthesis engine that predicts the timbre of arbitrary acoustic instruments. Musically meaningful, it is controlled …

The Musical Fireflies are digital rhythm toys that introduce mathematical concepts in music such as beat, accent, mono- and polyrhythm with…

The Emonator is a new musical instrument for amateurs and professionals alike. It gives users a three-dimensional tactile interface to cont…

This work is an application of a synthetic character metaphor to the production of music. Presented here is a small colony of creatures who…

The Kaoss network allows an interdependent group of musicians and novices to influence and control their own, as well as each other's, musi…

Hyperscore in the Hospital was an opportunity to use the Hyperscore composition system with a wide array of patients from the Tewksbury Sta…

Musical interaction occurs through one of three modalities: performing, listening, or composing. This project investigates new ways in whic…

Meteorite is a permanent, underground, interactive museum that opened in Essen, Germany in June 1998. Our group designed all of the intera…

The Interactive Fountain is a volumetric water display in which laminar water colums are perturbed to create illuminated pixels. As the per…

Using creative software for piano learning, we train non-musicians to play short melodies on a piano. We are conducting an fMRI study to lo…

A loop engine that records a voice-generated drum pattern. It can instantly and automatically loop it, quantize it, slow it down or speed i…

Building on the Media Lab hyperstring project of 1990-1993 (Machover, Chung, Gershenfeld, Paradiso, et al.), we are improving and redefinin…

The Future Music Blender (FMB) is a totally new part of the Brain Opera, which was permanently installed in Vienna in summer 2000. The FMB …

Sparkler is the opening piece for Toy Symphony concerts composed by Tod Machover. A simple, sinuous melody weaves throughout the piece, beg…

Tod Machover's latest opera premiered at the Houston Grand Opera in April and May 1999. It was Machover's first opera for traditional opera…

Skeleton is a set of Cocoa libraries optimized for fast development of research, and for professional applications dealing with the analysi…

This category of Music Toy is being designed as an inexpensive, stand-alone, sound-producing, and manipulating device that gains power when…

The Big Thing is a massive, child-oriented music construction kit that allows multiple children to experiment with creating musical structu…

Almost all kids love to sing, even if they sadly forget this later in life. Music is never work: you can only "play" it. Today's incredible…

A new violin bow has been developed that can measure intricate aspects of violin technique: the subtle elements of physical gesture that im…

The entire hyperinstruments project was founded on the idea of giving individuals powerful control over many layers and levels of music, in…

The Musical Jacket, first developed in fall 1997, has recently undergone hardware and software improvements, as well as functional updating…

To change radically the physical shape and feeling of technology, designers must also be able to change the materials from which it is made…