- Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Tod Machover
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Media Laboratory, Faculty Member
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My consistent and overriding artistic goal, ever since the earliest compositions of my student days, has been to create m usical forms that suggest the search for psychological and spiritual unity beyond seemingly impenetrable veils of... more
My consistent and overriding artistic goal, ever since the earliest compositions of my student days, has been to create m usical forms that suggest the search for psychological and spiritual unity beyond seemingly impenetrable veils of confusion and juxtaposition. That such unity exists — must exist — is one of my deepest convictions. That modern society presents an unprecedented network of complex parallel worlds, apparently so completely disconnected from each other, only amplifies my feeling that the search for deeper truths lies at the heart of our attempt to keep inter-personal and inter-cultural communication from breaking down and disappearing entirely. Because of its very neutrality and flexibility, computer music technology has long suggested itself to me as the ideal medium in which, paradoxically, the differentiation of musical materials can be intensified while ever-deeper layers of sonic coherence are established.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture and Planning, 1993.
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David Wessel was a musical visionary who combined scientific rigor, technological savvy, and sonic adventure to powerfully influential the formative years of Pierre Boulez’s IRCAM in Paris. Wessel was trained in mathematics and... more
David Wessel was a musical visionary who combined scientific rigor, technological savvy, and sonic adventure to powerfully influential the formative years of Pierre Boulez’s IRCAM in Paris. Wessel was trained in mathematics and percussion, receiving a Stanford Ph.D. in musical psychoacoustics. He brought these specialties to computer music at the crucial moment when real-time digital synthesis was being developed. His Antony (1977) was the first musical work to use Giuseppe di Giugno’s 4A machine, and his Timbre Maps (1978) demonstrated for the first time that sonority alone could produce structural relationships. Wessel brought free-jazz principles to live computer music performance, and was a pioneer in understanding and influencing the development of MIDI. Wessel became IRCAM’s Director of Pedagogy in 1980, and in that role inspired a generation of international composers, technologists and scientists, a veritable Who’s Who of today’s most prominent creators. As a member of IRCAM’s Artistic Committee, Wessel influenced the selection of artists for IRCAM residences and helped to invent a successful model for combining pedagogy, research and creation. Above all, David Wessel’s omnivorous love of all kinds of music, and his deep generosity, brought an unequaled spark of humanity to the world of man, music, and machines.
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Research Interests: Psychology and Musical
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... CiteULike is a free online bibliography manager. Register and you can start organising your references online. Tags. Hyperinstruments: Musically intelligent and interactive performance and creativity systems. ...
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Research Interests: Art and American music
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Analog Days The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer. Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002. 384 pp. $29.95. ISBN 0-674-00889-8. Constructing their account from interviews with the inventors,... more
Analog Days The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer. Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002. 384 pp. $29.95. ISBN 0-674-00889-8. Constructing their account from interviews with the inventors, engineers, and musicians who worked with the Moog, the authors discuss the invention, development, and impact of electronic synthesizers in the 1960s through mid-1970s.
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Morton Subotnick and Tod Machover discuss a variety of issues relating to the use of computers in music, and the integration of new resources into the culture. They discuss new instrument development, performance practice and the... more
Morton Subotnick and Tod Machover discuss a variety of issues relating to the use of computers in music, and the integration of new resources into the culture. They discuss new instrument development, performance practice and the assimilation of new musical materials in the context of Subotnick's long history of activity in these domains. The interview took place at the 1989 International Computer Music Conference at Ohio State University, and was updated in 1994.
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The accompanying media item for this thesis is available in the
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ONE OF THE most important features of IRCAM as an institute is that it provides a common meeting ground not only for scientists and musicians (a fact which has been much discussed) but one for composers and their colleagues (which has... more
ONE OF THE most important features of IRCAM as an institute is that it provides a common meeting ground not only for scientists and musicians (a fact which has been much discussed) but one for composers and their colleagues (which has been discussed less) ...
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This paper explores how an actuated pin-based shape display may serve as a platform on which to build musical instruments and controllers. We designed and prototyped three new instruments that use the shape display not only as an input... more
This paper explores how an actuated pin-based shape display may serve as a platform on which to build musical instruments and controllers. We designed and prototyped three new instruments that use the shape display not only as an input device, but also as a source of acoustic sound. These cover a range of interaction paradigms to generate ambient textures, polyrhythms, and melodies. This paper first presents existing work from which we drew interactions and metaphors for our designs. We then introduce each of our instruments and the back-end software we used to prototype them. Finally, we offer reflections on some central themes of NIME, including the relationship between musician and machine.
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Twitter has provided a social platform for everyone to enter the previously exclusive world of the internet, enriching this online social tapestry with cultural diversity and enabling revolutions. We believe this same tool can be used to... more
Twitter has provided a social platform for everyone to enter the previously exclusive world of the internet, enriching this online social tapestry with cultural diversity and enabling revolutions. We believe this same tool can be used to also change the world of music creation. Thus we present MMODM, an online drum machine based on the Twitter streaming API, using tweets from around the world to create and perform musical sequences together in real time. Users anywhere can express 16-beat note sequences across 26 different instruments using plain text tweets on their favorite device, in real-time. Meanwhile, users on the site itself can use the graphical interface to locally DJ the rhythm, filters, and sequence blending. By harnessing this duo of website and Twitter network, MMODM enables a whole new scale of synchronous musical collaboration between users locally, remotely, across a wide variety of computing devices, and across a variety of cultures.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture and Planning, 1993.
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The Electronic Fox Ears helmet is a listening device that changes its wearer's experience of hearing. A pair of head-mounted, independently articulated parabolic microphones and built-in bone conduction transducers allow the wearer to... more
The Electronic Fox Ears helmet is a listening device that changes its wearer's experience of hearing. A pair of head-mounted, independently articulated parabolic microphones and built-in bone conduction transducers allow the wearer to sharply direct their attention to faraway sound sources. Joysticks in each hand control the orientations of the microphones, which are mounted on servo gimbals for precise targeting. Paired with a mobile device, the helmet can function as a specialized, wearable field recording platform. Field recording and ambient sound have long been a part of electronic music; our device extends these practices by drawing on a tradition of wearable technologies and prosthetic art that blur the boundaries of human perception.
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Stage performances present many challenges and opportunities in the field of robotics. Onstage robots not only have to function flawlessly, they must interact convincingly with their human counterparts and adhere to a rigid timeline. The... more
Stage performances present many challenges and opportunities in the field of robotics. Onstage robots not only have to function flawlessly, they must interact convincingly with their human counterparts and adhere to a rigid timeline. The scope of this work is to create set pieces that look and behave like organic entities for the production of Tod Machover's new opera, Death and the Powers. With a set of design rules and techniques, I have developed the mechanical and control systems, including their interactive behavior, for several performance-ready robots. A six-legged walking robot and transformable robot were first built to verify the adopted design methodology prior to the prototyping of onstage robots. In addition, the robots were certified as performance-ready according to four criteria: the visual appearance, the overall functionality, the quality of movement, and the fluency of human-robot interaction. Two robots were successfully built and tested for use in the opera ...
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As a culture, we have the capacity to lead creative lives. Part of that capacity lies in how something like music can touch on just about every aspect of human thinking and experience. If music is such a pervasive phenomenon, what does it... more
As a culture, we have the capacity to lead creative lives. Part of that capacity lies in how something like music can touch on just about every aspect of human thinking and experience. If music is such a pervasive phenomenon, what does it mean for the way we consider our lives in health? There are three problems with connecting the richness of music to scientifically valid clinical interventions. First, it is unclear how to provide access to something as seemingly complex as music to a diverse group of subjects with various cognitive and physical deficits. Second, it is necessary to quantify what takes place in music interactions so that causality can be attributed to what is unique to the music experience compared to motivation or attention. Finally, one must provide the structure to facilitate clinical change without losing the communicative and expressive power of
We introduce a family of fragile electronic musical instruments designed to be "played'' through the act of destruction. Each Fragile Instrument consists of an analog synthesizing circuit with embedded sensors that detect the... more
We introduce a family of fragile electronic musical instruments designed to be "played'' through the act of destruction. Each Fragile Instrument consists of an analog synthesizing circuit with embedded sensors that detect the destruction of an outer shell, which is destroyed and replaced for each performance. Destruction plays an integral role in both the spectacle and the generated sounds. This paper presents several variations of Fragile Instruments we have created, discussing their circuit design as well as choices of material for the outer shell and tools of destruction. We conclude by considering other approaches to create intentionally destructible electronic musical instruments.
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Machines have the power and potential to make expressive music on their own. This thesis aims to computationally model the process of creating music using experience from listening to examples. Our unbiased signal-based solution models... more
Machines have the power and potential to make expressive music on their own. This thesis aims to computationally model the process of creating music using experience from listening to examples. Our unbiased signal-based solution models the life cycle of listening, composing, and performing, turning the machine into an active musician, instead of simply an instrument. We accomplish this through an analysis-synthesis technique by combined perceptual and structural modeling of the musical surface, which leads to a minimal data representation. We introduce a music cognition framework that results from the interaction of psychoacoustically grounded causal listening, a time-lag embedded feature representation, and perceptual similarity clustering. Our bottom-up analysis intends to be generic and uniform by recursively revealing metrical hierarchies and structures of pitch, rhythm, and timbre. Training is suggested for top-down unbiased supervision, and is demonstrated with the prediction ...
Performing artists have frequently used technology to sense and extend the body's natural expressivity via live control of multimedia. However, the sophistication, emotional content, and variety of expression possible through the... more
Performing artists have frequently used technology to sense and extend the body's natural expressivity via live control of multimedia. However, the sophistication, emotional content, and variety of expression possible through the original physical channels of voice and movement are generally not captured or represented by these technologies and thus cannot be intuitively transferred from body to digital media. Additionally, relevant components of expression vary between different artists, performance pieces, and output modalities, such that any single model for describing movement and the voice cannot be meaningful in all contexts. This dissertation presents a new framework for flexible parametric abstraction of expression in vocal and physical performance, the Expressive Performance Extension Framework. This framework includes a set of questions and principles to guide the development of new extended performance works and systems for performance extension, particularly those i...
Abstract!e way we perceive everyday space—a room, a building, a city—is informed not just by our immediate sensory input: culture, history, and other contextual cues complete our experience. With the advent of sensor-rich,... more
Abstract!e way we perceive everyday space—a room, a building, a city—is informed not just by our immediate sensory input: culture, history, and other contextual cues complete our experience. With the advent of sensor-rich, highly-connected objects, our ability to interpret and refine these contextual elements, and therefore our experience of space, grows ever sharper. Location-aware sound art has the potential to apply this new technology in groundbreaking ways, but at present such work is hampered by the lack of a widely-accessible composition platform. In this work, I survey prominent works in the locative-sound art field and propose a scale-independent software framework for composing sound in space. As a proof-of-concept and to encourage further dialogue, I use this framework to create a large-scale participatory project that will allow anyone to sound-design his or her neighborhood space.
This thesis presents SoundStrand, a novel tangible interface for composing music. A new paradigm is also presented- one that allows for music composition with limited degrees of freedom, and therefore is well suited for music creation... more
This thesis presents SoundStrand, a novel tangible interface for composing music. A new paradigm is also presented- one that allows for music composition with limited degrees of freedom, and therefore is well suited for music creation through the use of tangible interfaces. SoundStrand is comprised of a set of building blocks that represent pre-composed musical segments. By sequentially connecting building blocks to one another, the user arranges these segments into a musical theme; and by individually twisting, stretching and bending the blocks, variations of the melodic, harmonic and rhythmic content are introduced. Software tools are made available to program the musical segments and govern SoundStrand's behavior. Additional work, namely the Coda system, is presented in order to put SoundStrand and the described paradigm in a wider context as tools for music sharing and learning.
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Media Scores provide a theoretical and technical means to orchestrate multiple modalities in the creation of expressive works of art and performance. New technologies afford numerous opportunities to tell stories and create expressive... more
Media Scores provide a theoretical and technical means to orchestrate multiple modalities in the creation of expressive works of art and performance. New technologies afford numerous opportunities to tell stories and create expressive artworks through a variety of media. However, the tools of planning, composition, design, and creation of these works remain disjoint with respect to the artwork's constituent disciplines and from the final experience. Media Scores extend the metaphor of a musical score to other modalities in order to facilitate the process of authoring and performing multimedia compositions, providing a medium through which to realize a modern-day Gesamtkunstwerk. Research into the representation and encoding of expressive intent provides the conceptual underpinnings for the development of novel interfaces for composing and performing with Media Scores. Using such a tool, the composer is able to shape an artistic work that may be performed through human and techn...
Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences This thesis discusses the design and implementation of Hyperscore, a computer-assisted composition system intended for users of all musical backgrounds. Hyper-score presents a unique graphical... more
Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences This thesis discusses the design and implementation of Hyperscore, a computer-assisted composition system intended for users of all musical backgrounds. Hyper-score presents a unique graphical interface which takes input in the form of freehand drawing. The strokes in the drawing are mapped to structural and gestural elements in the music, allowing the user to describe the large scale-structure of a piece vi-sually. Hyperscore's graphical notation also enables the depiction of musical ideas on a detailed level. Additional annotations around a main curve indicate the place-ment and emphasis of selected motives. These motives are short melodic fragments that are either composed by the user or selected from a set of pre-composed ma-terial. Changing qualitative aspects of the annotations such as texture and shape let the user alter dierent musical parameters. The ultimate goal of Hyperscore is
This thesis presents several works involving robotic musical instruments. Robots have long been used in industry for performing repetitive tasks, or jobs requiring superhuman strength. However, more recently robots have found a niche as... more
This thesis presents several works involving robotic musical instruments. Robots have long been used in industry for performing repetitive tasks, or jobs requiring superhuman strength. However, more recently robots have found a niche as musical instruments. The works presented here attempt to address the musicality of these instruments, their use in various settings, and the relationship of a robotic instrument to its human player in terms of mapping and translating gesture to sound. The primary project, The Chandelier, addresses both hardware and software issues, and builds directly from experience with two other works, The Marshall Field’s Flower Show and Jeux Deux. The Marshall Field’s Flower Show is an installation for several novel musical instruments and controllers. Presented here is a controller and mapping system for a Yamaha Disklavier player piano that allows for real-time manipulation of musical variations on famous compositions. The work is presented in the context of t...
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Music today is more ubiquitous, accessible, and democratized than ever. Thanks to technologies such as high-end home studios, audio compression, and digital distribution, music now surrounds us in everyday life, almost every piece of... more
Music today is more ubiquitous, accessible, and democratized than ever. Thanks to technologies such as high-end home studios, audio compression, and digital distribution, music now surrounds us in everyday life, almost every piece of music is a few minutes of download away, and almost any western musician, novice or expert, can compose, perform and distribute their music directly to their listeners from their home studios. But at the same time these technologies lead to some concerning social effects on the culture of consuming and creating music. Although music is available for more people, in more locations, and for longer periods of time, most listeners experience it in an incidental, unengaged, or utilitarian manner. On the creation side, home studios promote private and isolated practice of music making where hardly any musical instruments or even musicians are needed, and where the value of live group interaction is marginal. My thesis work attempts to use technology to addres...
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The marriage of dance and interactive image has been a persistent dream over the past decades, but reality has fallen far short of potential for both technical and conceptual reasons. This thesis proposes a new approach to the problem and... more
The marriage of dance and interactive image has been a persistent dream over the past decades, but reality has fallen far short of potential for both technical and conceptual reasons. This thesis proposes a new approach to the problem and lays out the theoretical, technical and aesthetic framework for the innovative art form of digitally augmented human movement. I will use as example works a series of installations, digital projections and compositions each of which contains a choreographic component---either through collaboration with a choreographer directly or by the creation of artworks that automatically organize and understand purely virtual movement. These works lead up to two unprecedented collaborations with two of the greatest choreographers working today; new pieces that combine dance and interactive projected light using real-time motion capture live on stage. The existing field of "dance technology" is one with many problems. This is a domain with many practi...
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Building on the understanding of music and architecture as creators of spatial experience, this paper presents a novel way of unfolding music’s spatial qualities in the physical world. Spaces That Perform Themselves arose as an innovative... more
Building on the understanding of music and architecture as creators of spatial experience, this paper presents a novel way of unfolding music’s spatial qualities in the physical world. Spaces That Perform Themselves arose as an innovative response to the current relationship between sound and space, where we build static spaces to contain dynamic sounds. What if we change the static parameter of spaces and start building dynamic spaces to contain dynamic sounds? This project combines architectural theories with musical mastery and computation to create an environment as kinetically undulant and emotionally varied as music itself. To achieve this, a multisensory kinetic room is built in order to augment our sonic perception through a cross-modal spatial choreography that combines sound, spatial movement, light, color and vibration. By breaking down boundaries between disciplines, the possibilities of a new type of architectural typology that morphs responsively with a musical piece c...