Tod Machover on Composing Music by Computer
The inventor and MIT professor talks about where music and technology will intersect over the course of the next 40 years
- By Erica R. Hendry
- Smithsonian magazine, July-August 2010, Subscribe
Tod Machover, Called “America’s Most wired composer” by the Los Angeles Times, has written six operas, including the robotic Death and the Powers, scheduled to debut in Monaco in September. The 56-year-old composer and cellist is the inventor of Hyperscore, a computer program that enables even the untrained to write music, and his students created the popular computer-based toys Guitar Hero and Rock Band. He spoke with the magazine’s Erica R. Hendry at MIT, where he’s a professor of music and media.
How is technology democratizing music?
Art can transform people’s lives. But it should be available and understandable to everybody. It should be serious but not elitist. Sure, if you want to study for 20 years and become incredibly skilled at a particular musical instrument, that’s great. But I can also make an instrument that would allow you right now to take a piece of music and shape it. Hyperscore, which uses lines and colors to allow children basically to draw music, is pretty sophisticated but very easy to use. Kids have fantastic ideas, and if you can get them to try something with a tool like Hyperscore, within 20 minutes you can start to explore what structure is, what it means to tell a story with music. It’s democratizing music because it lets everybody make their own music.
How did you end up at MIT’s Media Lab?
My mom is a pianist, and a very creative music teacher, and my dad was in computer graphics. So there was music and technology at home. At the end of a piano lesson my mom would say, “Look around the house for something that makes an interesting sound.” We’d run around and get a book, a lamp, a pot, a pan. She’d say, “What sound does it make? What’s the loudest you can make it? What if you combined it with another sound? Can we make a story out of those sounds?” We’d work like that until we created a piece. Then she’d say, “Can you make a picture of what you just heard so we can play it again next week?” In that little bit of experimentation I learned that music wasn’t just something printed, written by dead people you’ll never see. Music comes from the world around you. It’s ordered by people for particular reasons. Music is a way of telling a story—whether it has characters or not, it has to have a progression.
Some musicians say people who use technology shortcuts don’t understand
what they’re doing.
There are people who say you couldn’t possibly get to an interesting musical experience without paying your dues. I agree that concentration and effort and sustained focus on anything are going to reveal richer and more exciting things you can do. But it’s not always so obvious even when you study an instrument for 20 years how to get to the deep part of it. Most of the activities I’m involved with are getting people to the core of musical expression as fast as possible and then setting up an environment where they enjoy it enough to spend days or years getting better at it.
How will music change in 40 years?
Nowadays, composers and performers find the simplest way to make music that appeals to the largest number of people. One way that music will develop is in the opposite direction—creating music that only you respond to, based on our growing understanding of the neuroscience of music. You could share such music with others. But we could fine-tune this personal music to have a specific emotional and a mental effect. Then music could be a tool for pulling someone out of depression or calming them down. Specialists who are partly psychiatrists and partly composers and partly neuroscientists could help create that music and prescribe it, then shape and tweak it during a listening experience for maximum impact. That might be a dream now, but it will soon be possible, and this seems an enormous change in the potential of music to reach us in the most powerful way.
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Comments (6)
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Posted by george magazine on June 15,2012 | 07:19 PM
Machover's music is terribly boring and academic. He attempts to divert attention from a lack compositional originality, or even personality, by staging a tedious series of visual and conceptual diversions, which are, essentially, watered-down John Cage. True creativity cannot be taught, and that is why MIT and other institutions mostly promote superficial techniques that can be repeated in predictable guises, yet are self-consciously 'complicated' enough to pass for true innovation and invention. Ultimately, Machover, and many others like him, are akin to automobile companies who pretend to be creating new vehicles that do not pollute, but end up producing gas-guzzlers.
Posted by Larry Harbor on June 19,2011 | 04:47 AM
Mr. Machover, you're a genius! Where were you when I was a wanna-be rock star kid? Thank you for making music accessible to the masses.
Posted by Glenn McGrew on November 2,2010 | 08:06 AM
When I was in the third grade I swore off learning music because My music teacher would strike my knuckles with my drumsticks. I'm sixty five now and learning the guitar and sight reading music. the wealth of satisfaction now is almost overwhelming. My latest adventure in music though, is that I'm making my own instrument. I'm no genius and no prodigy. I just enjoy a road less traveled. Although I embrace progress,I think it's equally important to understand where progress comes from and if it takes you down"the road less traveled" pay attention to the journey. It makes the destination worth the trip.
Posted by bob m on August 14,2010 | 06:14 PM
At 23, I have studied music most of my life. However, upon entering college I found myself torn between two worlds- one, in which creation of art and music are the domains of highly trained individuals for the purpose of negotiating and imagining the greater cultural and social world an artist is imbedded in, and the other, a creation of media for consumption and enjoyment of a market of listeners. It tends to be assumed that the central conflict is between so-called "high" and "low" art. In actuality the conflict is between the old guard of academia and entertainment and the avante garde of personalized and diversified media. While the internet both dismantles the ivory towers and destroys the mainstream media's stranglehold on arts accessibility, all the while making both the Billboard top 40's and the conservatory sets more and more irrelevant, it also allows many more people to create and be heard. The musicians I've been working with recently are diverse- from street mc's to violinists with degrees- and we've begun experimenting with ways to negotiate this new arts world. Technology, especially that which is interactive, is one of the greatest potentials for truly personal art. For example, we are looking right now at installing interactive software that will allow our audiences to change major elements of our compositions in real-time, forcing us as musicians to react to those changes, and allowing for an intensely democratic creation process in which the fourth wall separating performer from audience is eroded. As more and more people begin creating music with tools designed for ease of use and minimal training, the musical language of our culture will become less hegemonic, less mainstreamable, and less predictable. Curiously, it will become more relevant to our day-to-day lives- less likely to be pushed into museums and certainly less monocultural. We are entering a new age, one in which art is less of an artifact and more of a living discourse.
Posted by Vivian E on July 17,2010 | 08:01 PM
As an older musician/ composer I believe that technology is a real benefit to anyone wanting to experience music today. I agree with the premise that the easier it is for someone to "make music" in some form, the more inclined they will be to continue on with more advanced studies. Today's digital domain has placed wonderful tools at our disposal for creation and performance. I, for one, do not want to go back to the "good old days".
Posted by David on July 1,2010 | 03:25 PM