Tod Machover
Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media
MIT Media Lab
About Tod Machover
Composer/inventor Tod Machover is Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media at the MIT Media Lab where he is also Faculty Director. Called “a musical visionary” by The New York Times, Machover creates music that breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries and designs technologies that expand music’s potential for everyone, from celebrated virtuosi to musicians of all abilities. Machover’s work has been commissioned and performed by many of the world’s most prominent artists and institutions, from Yo-Yo Ma to Carnegie Hall to Seoul Arts Center, and has been awarded numerous prizes and honors worldwide. Machover has developed numerous new technologies for music, from Hyperinstruments that enhance performance expressivity for virtuosi and amateurs (Guitar Hero grew out of his Lab), to Hyperscore that uses simple lines and colors to open musical creativity for young people, to numerous sonic strategies for promoting wellbeing and combatting disease, to radical and rewarding applications of musical AI.
Machover is especially known for his community-collaborative City Symphonies and for his groundbreaking operas such as the sci-fi VALIS, the audience interactive Brain Opera, and the robotic Death and the Powers which was finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is currently working on his next opera, The Overstory, based on Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the relationship between humans and the non-human world, especially trees.
Machover is also engaged in developing musical technologies to support health and wellbeing, from special frequencies to diagnose and treat diseases such as Alzheimer’s, to interfaces that provide expressive communication through sound for nonverbal populations and stroke rehab through telehealth, to personalized audio for boosting mood and combatting depression.
Events with Tod Machover
Music and AI: Threat or Blessing
Will AI increase our musical enjoyment or dull our emotional response? Will it enhance our sonic creativity or lead us to become quick-but-facile “composers”? Tod Machover — who has been...