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How we’ll forget John Lennon

César Hidalgo considers the role technology plays in how people and events enter, and fade from, collective memory.

MIT’s zero-gravity musical instrument provides a soundtrack for space travel

The Telemetron was created in response to a call from the MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative.

A musical instrument for astronauts and other news

BBC Click's Nick Kwek looks at some of the best technology stories of the week.

Schoenberg in Hollywood in the news

A selection of recent press coverage on Tod Machover's newest opera, Schoenberg in Hollywood.

Consumer Electronics Laboratory

Reaching tech's limit, YouTube phenom Jacob Collier seeks a human touch

As Collier gets ready to release his sophomore album, "Djesse," he's adding a new element to his musical world: other people.

Future Storytelling

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Style and Idea: Schoenberg and the Media Lab

As an intellect and creator, Schoenberg would have fit right into the Lab.

‘Schoenberg in Hollywood’ is a composer biography like no other

You probably won’t find anything resembling the rest of the opera in any Schoenberg biography anywhere.

Musical worlds collide with BLO’s world premiere of “Schoenberg in Hollywood”

An enticing historical drama explores the conflict between maintaining artistic integrity and an artist’s longing to reach a wider audience.

Karole Armitage talks ‘Schoenberg in Hollywood’ opera, her days as a punk ballerina, and the lack of female choreographers

Karole Armitage, the distinguished choreographer, is directing the world premiere of 'Schoenberg in Hollywood,' composed by Tod Machover.

Life of the composer Arnold Schoenberg inspires Tod Machover’s latest opera ‘Schoenberg in Hollywood’

Machover, known for his use of new technologies to expand music, was moved by Schoenberg’s commitment to maintain his artistic integrity.

From Robots to Schoenberg: MIT Opera of the Future composer Tod Machover evolves tradition with tech

Visionary composer Tod Machover is unleashing his latest marriage of technology and tradition: "Schoenberg in Hollywood."

Schoenberg in Hollywood: New opera examines ideas of heritage, politics, and artistic integrity

On November 14, the Boston Lyric Opera will present the World Premiere of Schoenberg in Hollywood, a new opera by Tod Machover, the Muriel …

Powers Live

Death and the Powers: Global Interactive Simulcast

VisualSoundtrack

We present VisualSoundtrack, a system designed as a tool for soundtrack composers to experiment with original musical content in differin…

Philadelphia Voices

Philadelphia Voices is the latest in the series of City Symphonies projects that Tod Machover and the Opera of the Future group have c…

Quantizer: Sonification Platform for High-Energy Physics Data

Inspired by previous work in the field of data sonification, we built a data-driven composition platform that enables users to map collisio…

Publication Research

Sonification platform for interaction with real-time particle collision data from the atlas detector

Cherston, Juliana, et al. "Sonification platform for interaction with real-time particle collision data from the atlas detector." Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2016.

Next Machover opera: “Schoenberg in Hollywood”

The Boston Lyric Opera just announced the commission for Tod Machover’s next opera, called Schoenberg in Hollywood. The premiere will be in…

Making Music in Space

Nicole L'Huillier speaks at Sónar+D

The Telemetron is a post-Earth musical instrument designed for zero gravity

The Telemetron generates musical compositions using gyroscopic “chimes.”

10+ years of Human 2.0

Revisit Human 2.0, a 2007 Media Lab symposium focused on the future of human adaptability.

Breaking Forms’ bubbly space pop will lift you to a galaxy far far away

Breaking Forms is the literal and creative marriage of Juan Necochea and Nicole L’Huillier.

Grad Life: How to make almost anything better

How to Make (almost) Anything is a community as much as it is a class.

Q&A: Composer Tod Machover presents “Philadelphia Voices”

Ambitious new piece in his “City Symphony” series features the birthplace of American democracy.

How a Philly cheesesteak goes from the grill to Carnegie Hall

“Philadelphia Voices” is the latest in a series of Machover symphonies inspired by cities.

Orchestra’s new crowdsourced choral work features ‘Philadelphia Voices’

This week, the Philadelphia Orchestra premieres a new musical composition about its home city, by the city — in a way.

Giving Voice to Philadelphians

Tod Machover shares his insights into the creation and community of "Philadelphia Voices."

Mummers and sizzling Philly cheesesteaks get their Philadelphia Orchestra moment

Suffering for art took on frigid new meaning for composer Tod Machover while creating his new symphony for the Philadelphia Orchestra.

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Electronic Publishing

How to distill meaning from complex everyday experiences.

Boulez’s shocker from midcentury, and the waves it made

Mahler once quipped that “tradition” often represents nothing more than lazy, outdated habits of mind. In the postwar years, the composer, …

New app to weave Philadelphia sounds into a symphony

This app allows Philadelphia users to make recordings and submit them for the City Symphonies project.

Jacob Collier isn’t the only wizard behind his one-man show

Jacob Collier calls from Chile, where he’s in the middle of a South American tour. He’s a long way from the London bedroom where he got his…

Imagination off the charts

New documentary chronicles Jacob Collier's collaborations at MIT.

FabricKeyboard turns textile into a musical instrument

FabricKeyboard is an instrument you play by pressing, twisting, pulling, and stretching.

FabricKeyboard, la tastiera di tessuto del MIT

È un’interfaccia collegabile a computer e sintetizzatori, è responsive come un pad e suonabile quanto una primordiale tastiera.

MIT researchers turned a strip of fabric into a high-tech musical instrument

Textile in G Major

MIT's Experimental Keyboard Is Unlike Any Instrument You've Seen (Or Heard)

In a new project from MIT Media Lab, the FabricKeyboard is an instrument you play by pressing, twisting, pulling and stretching.

Nurturing the creation of music through the blockchain

Blockchain technology could help to revolutionize how artists get paid.

Kinephone: Exploring the acoustic musical potential of an actuated pin-based shape display

This paper explores how an actuated pin-based shape display may serve as a platform on which to build musical instruments and controllers. …

Archived

Fragile Instruments

We introduce a family of fragile electronic musical instruments designed to be “played” through the act of destruction. Each Fragile Instru…

Archived

Publication Research

Fragile Instruments: Constructing Destructible Musical Interfaces

Fragile Instruments: Constructing Destructible Musical Interfaces. Don Derek Haddad, Xiao Xiao, Tod Machover, Joe Paradiso, to appear in NIME17.

Archived

Remote Theatrical Immersion: Extending "Sleep No More"

The MIT Media Lab collaborated with London-based theater group Punchdrunk to create an online platform connected to their New York City pro…

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Hyperscore

Music software that lets anyone compose music. The first music software program designed to teach students and adults how to compose music …

Fensadense

Fensadense is a new work for 10-piece ensemble composed by Tod Machover, commissioned for the Lucerne Festival in summer 2015. The project …

Yannick Nézet-Séguin discusses new Machover project

In this interview, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, discusses Tod Machover’s “Philadelphia Voices,” a work co…

Miami “city symphony” announced

Composer Tod Machover’s ground-breaking “city symphony” projects, which involve entire urban communities in collaborating to create sonic p…

ImmerSound

ImmerSound is a virtual reality experience wherein one can compose music by drawing in 3D.The result of the composition is a sculpted sound…

Disembodied Performance

Early in the opera "Death and the Powers," the main character, Simon Powers, is subsumed into a technological environment of his own creati…

Remote Theatrical Immersion: Extending Sleep No More

Fall 2011—May 2012Article by Peter Torpey, Ben Bloomberg, Elena Jessop, and Akito van TroyerThe MIT Media Lab collaborated with London-base…

New City Symphony projects featured in The Atlantic

Turning Street Noise Into a City SymphonyAn MIT composer is collecting snippets of sound to turn Miami and Philadelphia into audio masterpi…

A Guinea Pig’s Night at the Theater

Even when it is not executed perfectly, theater can stir a range of feelings, from boundless elation to existential despair.

Vessels, the Music Created by Physiological Signals of Emotions

According to Leslie, the Vessels goes beyond a metaphor. It encapsulates the technical process. By the signal processing techniques, she al…

Crowdsourcing Meets Music for Symphonies of the Future

With the Collaborative City Symphony project, Machover encourages individuals to capture the sounds of their cities and convey how they fee…

Creating “big, beautiful things”

Senior Garrett Parrish combines art and technology, with dramatic effects.

Innovation in arts and culture #4: Punchdrunk – Sleep No More

Ever heard of 'remote and real world interconnected theatrical immersion'? Punchdrunk's Peter Higgin explains all

How people and objects can tell tales of their experience and learn from others as they navigate through the vast media fabric made up of intertwining storied threads.

Sleep No More: What It's Like Inside the World's Most Interactive Play

Come with me. I've got something to show you.

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How to give computers human-like intuition so they can better understand us.

eRationality

How we can understand human behavior (rationality, semi-rationality, bounded rationality, and just plain irrationality) in day-to-day behaviors, and in particular in electronic environments.

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How to engage diverse audiences in creating their own technology by situating computation in new contexts and building tools to democratize engineering.

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How to enhance understanding, enable creativity, and ease our interactions with the technological environment.

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How various phenomena of mind emerge from the interactions among many kinds of highly evolved brain mechanisms.

Grassroots Invention

How to engineer and disseminate powerful, low-cost design and fabrication technologies at a grassroots level.

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