Tod Machover

Composer/inventor Tod Machover is Faculty Director of the MIT Media Lab where he is also Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media and Director of the Opera of the Future group. Called a “musical visionary” by The New York Times, Machover creates music that breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries and designs technologies that expand music’s potential for everyone, from celebrated virtuosi to musicians of all abilities. 

Machover is known for developing new technologies for music, from Hyperinstruments that enhance performance expressivity for virtuosi and amateurs (Guitar Hero grew out of his Lab), to Hyperscore that uses simple lines and colors to open musical creativity for young people, to numerous sonic strategies for promoting wellbeing and combatting disease, to radical and rewarding applications of musical AI. Machover lectures and writes frequently about music and its widest potential, and two book chapters—"AI and Musical Discovery" (MIT Press) and "Composing the Future of Health", in Music and Mind edited by soprano Renée Fleming (Viking Random House)—were published in 2024.

Machover’s music has been performed and commissioned by—among others—Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Kronos Quartet, the Lucerne Festival (where he was 2015 Composer-in-Residence), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), Seoul Arts Center, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and mezzo-soprano Joyce Di Donato. He has received numerous prizes and honors, including from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fromm and Koussevitzky Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, Musical America (which named him Composer of the Year), and the French Culture Ministry, which appointed him an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres. Machover is especially celebrated for his groundbreaking operas including the AI-infused VALIS (1987; revised 2023), the audience-interactive Brain Opera (1996), and the robotic Death and the Powers (2010), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His Schoenberg in Hollywood (2018) was performed in Shenzhen, China in November 2023 and in Los Angeles in May 2025. 

Machover is currently working on his next opera, The Overstory, based on Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the relationship between humans and the non-human world (especially trees!) which will premiere at Boston Lyric Opera in early 2028; on a new commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra for premiere in Fall 2026; and also on “City Symphonies”—sonic portraits of places combining “music” and “found sound” composed for and with the people who live there—for Seoul (2027) and Los Angeles (2028).