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Epi/20: Fluid Music | Mutating Music with MIT Media Lab’s Charles Holbrow

By Matt McButter and Mike Weider

In this episode we speak with music of the future researcher Charles Holbrow. When we spoke with him, he was on the brink of earning his PhD from the Opera of the Future group within the famed MIT Media Lab.

We talk to Charles about the fact that while new styles and new technologies are constantly emerging, recorded music itself has not fundamentally changed. We dig into the concept of adaptive or interactive music -  music that changes itself as we listen to it, triggered by the events in the environment or listener behaviour. We discuss how a more fluid approach to music recording would impact both the creator and the listener. We also get his take on computer-generated music, exploring the topic of whether a machine will ever have the capacity to create a masterpiece.

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