Where Guitar Hero Comes From | Tod Machover | Big Think

Where Guitar Hero Comes From

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The invention behind the popular video game began with guinea pigs Yo-Yo Ma and Penn and Teller.

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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: Describe the genesis of hyperinstruments.

Tod Machover: So, in a funny way, hyperinstruments – I keep talking about the Beatles, and I think it’s maybe because Sergeant Pepper's came out when I was about 13 or 14 and that was a pretty impressionable age, and it was such a kind of radical period. But that period of the Beatles really had a big influence on me and I think are directly related to hyperinstruments.

So here an album like Sergeant Pepper's comes out, incredibly new sounds, layer upon layer of studio produced sound like nothing anybody had ever done before. And it’s also the period when the Beatles realized that what they were making in the studio could never be performed. And they had already given up on performing because there were too many screaming fans and they were playing in larger and larger venues so they couldn’t even hear what they were playing, it just wasn’t any fun any more. At the same time, their music evolved to something that they could only put together in a multi-track recording studio. So, I think so many things about that period in the late ‘60’s stuck with me. The sense of – I mean, I love the cello, I love the physical sense of an instrument that’s about the size of your body that vibrates enough that even if you play an open string, you feel it. You really feel it from your toes to your hair follicles and it really uses your – you have to put a fair amount of effort into the instrument. I think a double bass for me would be too much effort. But the cello, you’re really engaged and the sound is kind of right here. So, it feels like being merged, married to an instrument. I like that feeling and I like the idea of imagining a sound and feeling a sound and then having it come out through your body, through an instrument like that. That’s an important way to make music.

Then you have something like the Beatles making this great music where they say, “You know? We just give up. We’re never going to perform this. It’s not just that we’re not going to go on tour right now; this music has too many layers. It’s got too many changes in the sound. This voice is all of a sudden gets prominent and then disappears and this is its final version.” You also have at exactly the same years – I never thought of that, but 1967, Glenn Gould, the great pianist, wrote an article called The Future of Recording, and that was exactly the period when Glenn Gould said, “I’m never going to play in public anymore. First of all, I’m kind of shy and I don’t like –

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