A Conversation with MIT Lab Inventor & Composer Tod Machover | Big Think

A Conversation with MIT Lab Inventor & Composer Tod Machover

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A conversation with the composer and inventor at MIT Media Lab.

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Tod Machover:

Tod Machover is head of the Media Lab's Hyperinstruments/Opera of the Future group. An influential composer, he has been praised for creating music that breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries; his music has been performed and commissioned by some of the world's most important performers and ensembles. In 1995, he received a "Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres," one of France's highest cultural honors, and in 1998 he was awarded the first DigiGlobe Prize from the German government. He has composed five operas and is the inventor of Hyperinstruments, a technology that uses smart computers to augment virtuosity. Hyperinstruments have been used by performers such as Yo-Yo Ma, Prince, and Peter Gabriel. Machover is also the creator of the Toy Symphony, an international music performance and education project. His research group is currently examining ways to use music in therapy for emotionally and physically challenged individuals. His newest opera, Death and the Powers, to premiere in Monte-Carlo 2010, is being developed by an extraordinary creative team of international artists, designers, writers, and theatrical luminaries, as well as by an interdisciplinary team of Media Lab graduate and undergraduate students. Scored for a small ensemble of specially designed Hyperinstruments, Powers will feature a robotic, animatronic stage—the first of its kind—that will gradually “come alive” as the opera’s main character. Machover, who was formerly director of musical research at Pierre Boulez's IRCAM institute in Paris, received both his BA and MA from the Juilliard School in New York.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: How did being raised by a piano teacher and a computer scientist influence your growing up?

Tod Machover: Yeah, I definitely think that in my case, I come from a very close family and my parents, they’ve really had a strong influence on my growing up and especially with what I ended up doing. It’s actually kind of weird, I think sometimes. But, they’re very different in a lot of ways and I think for some reason, it’s been very important to me to find out how to bring those cultures together. They actually still to this day get along extremely well, but they’re so different.

My mom grew up in upstate New York, a kind of European, intellectual environment. She studied piano her whole growing up; she’s really good and went to Juilliard, so she was a terrific pianist. Around the time I was born, she decided not to concertize, but to teach. She’s a very energetic and creative person, so she really, I think, developed a personal style with teaching, both excellent piano teaching, but always cared a great deal about encouraging all of her students to make their own music and learn theory in really inventive ways.

When I was a little kid, we used to have a big plastic staff that filled the whole living room that had a bass cleft and a treble cleft and you’d throw a bean bag on these things and either sing the note or jump to the note, it was all fun. And she also had us do things like, I remember at the end of a piano lesion, I was sort of her guinea pig because I was the oldest of three kids, and she’d say, “Okay, lessons are over.” There’d be three or four of us around and she’d say, I’ll give you ten minutes to go through the house and everybody bring back some object that makes an interesting sound. Anything you want to. So, we’d run around and bring back a book, or a pot, or a lamp, or whatever. And then we’d sit down and she’d say, “Okay, what sound does that one make? Oh, that’s interesting. Great. What’s the loudest sound you can make with that? Oh, what’s the softest sound? Oh, that’s interesting. Okay. What does it sound like if you play those two at the same time? Oh, that’s interesting. If you were going to give out a word to describe that sound, what would you say? Oh, peaceful. Oh great. So, now we’ve got these sounds, these words. How can we tell a story with these? Oh great, okay, well we want to start with that, terrific.” And so we’d make up a little story and who would go first, second and what the story was, and then you’d play this thing. And then she’d say, “Okay, for next week, when you’re home, see if you can make a picture of what we did so when you come back next week, we can try it again.”

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