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Attribution 4.0 International
Opera of the Future
The Automatar is an intelligent AI-powered bass guitar born to bridge the gap between the digital and physical worlds. While the …
Do you hear the sound of a breath, or an ocean wave? A heartbeat, or thunder? Journey through a universe of shifting sonic identities …
Symphony for the Koreas will be the latest installment of the celebrated City Symphony series. Over the next few years, Tod Machover and hi…
The world wide web was conceived 30 years ago. What will internet media look like after another 30 years? Should we expect it to be mostly …
Oniorb is an explorable musical object that was created with the idea of stress relief in mind. It is meant to act as a stress ball that al…
This project is a collaboration between the MIT Media Lab and the San Diego Zoo to design and build interactive sonic enrichment systems fo…
Bauhaus artist Paul Klee considered a line to be one of the atomic elements of art and architecture. He famously described a line dra…
Ritual I: The Thing Itself consists of a choreographed robotic body that is in constant flux. It performs a dance of repetitive patter…
The internet changed how we create, distribute, and consume music and media. Modern digital tools for creating music and media …
The Telemetron is a musical instrument specially designed to be performed in microgravity environments. It is created to explore …
Songs released on music streaming services are static, never changing after their initial release. Evolving Media proposes a content p…
The superpose installation mediates continuously changing wave phenomena within a space that are visible, audible, and react to the presenc…
A collection of tutorials to introduce computer protocols for sharing data between computers and over the internet, for artistic purposes…
The Joy Branch project explores different user interfaces to allow parrots to shape their sonic environment. Animal agency—contr…
Evergreen Blues is a suite of interactive songs that together provide a collaborative musical narrative experience in the form of a multipl…
Adaptive Music for Affect Improvement (AMAI) is a music generation and playback system with the goal of steering the listener toward a stat…
"The sense of freedom…entails not simply the absence of frustration but the absence of obstacles to possible choices and activities—absence…
An initial experiment with cloud-enabled audio production software.A collection of docker containers work together to stream the audio and …
Hybrid Radio: A parasitic molecular infrastructureThis work opens a dialogue around the possibilities of re-thinking radio communication as…
Mumble Melody uses musically altered sensory feedback as a potential treatment for stuttering.Several studies have shown improvement in spe…
The MIT Media Lab collaborated with London-based theater group Punchdrunk to create an online platform connected to their New York City pro…
Figments is a theatrical performance that tells a story inspired by a variety of source texts, including Dante Alighieri's prosimetrum La V…
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…
We are all equipped with two extremely expressive instruments for performance: the body and the voice. By using computer systems to sense a…
We are developing a new set of movement experiences titled Crenulations and Excursions. This work consists of two aspects: a public install…
The Feast is an immersive, multi-sensory experience in four acts. Each act explores a different theme of eating, from mysterious to playful…
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…
Experiments in animating butterflies and moths with Shape Memory Metal, as part of a collaboration with the Punch Drunk theater group.
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…
The Vocal Augmentation and Manipulation Prosthesis (VAMP) is a gesture-based, wearable controller for live-time vocal performance. This con…
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 (1997-2015) is an attempt to bring expression and creativity to everyone, in public or at home, by combining an exceptional…
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…