Hacking CommencementIn the finest MIT tradition of community-driven innovation, the Commencement Committee and a core group of engineers, technologists, and artists across campus are putting minds and hands to work to create a meaningful, engaging online Commencement experience for the Class of 2020. 

Moving the tradition-rich celebration online without diminishing its significance, and with less than two months to plan, is a complex problem. The organizing team knew from the outset that the challenge would be to achieve the key moments of the Commencement ceremony in an online environment, without trying to recreate the in-person experience. Professor Eric Grimson, chancellor for academic advancement and chair of the Commencement Committee, says, "We are in a fortunate position to adapt to this year’s circumstances. Running Commencement the normal way is a logistical tour de force, involving hundreds of people, many of whom who work all year to make it happen. Moving it online was a different kind of coordination, but thanks to the knowledge embedded in the team, it didn't feel like starting from scratch."

It helps that the Institute is equipped with an extensive toolkit for building online experiences. “We’ve spent the last two decades opening up MIT to the world virtually through online teaching and learning,” says Professor Sanjay Sarma, vice president for open learning. “By combining MIT’s experience in digital technologies with the passion and ingenuity of the MIT community, I knew something amazing would emerge.”
Honoring tradition

The Commencement Committee recognized the challenge in creating a sense of occasion in an all-remote event. In addition to ensuring that the technical elements function effectively, the planning team worked to develop a meaningful experience through which degree candidates become MIT alumni. Student government representatives recommended that the program not exceed one hour, although it will be preceded by an introductory pre-program show co-hosted by graduating seniors Talia Khan and Yaateh Richardson. The pre-program will include greetings to family and friends submitted by students as part of a project organized by MIT Video Productions (MVP).

In addition to the student greetings, MVP has developed a celebratory retrospective that will be part of the pre-program show. “One of the things the planning team has had in mind is balancing a natural feeling of loss and disappointment with the fact that graduating from MIT is a tremendous accomplishment,” says Larry Gallagher, senior producer and advisor to the vice president for open learning. “We don’t want to let the last three months overshadow students’ four to six years at MIT.” 

The Institute has always cherished its traditions, and the online program will incorporate as many as possible, including a digital version of the iconic turning of the Brass Rat class ring as students become alumni. In reimagining the look and feel of Commencement, Institute Events invited Peter Agoos and Andrew Zamore of Agoos D*zines, with whom they had collaborated on the MIT150 and MIT2016 celebrations, to join the planning team. Frederick Harris, lecturer in music and director of wind ensembles, provided artistic guidance.

The speaking portion of the online Commencement program and degree conferral will open with remarks by Robert Millard ’73, chair of the MIT Corporation, who will introduce guest speaker William H. McRaven, retired U.S. Navy admiral and former chancellor of the University of Texas system. Following salutes from Graduate Student Council President Peter Su and Senior Class President Nwanacho Nwana, President L. Rafael Reif will give his charge to the graduates and confer degrees. Esther Duflo PhD ’99, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics this past autumn, will offer a salute to the advanced degree candidates. The program concludes with the school song, led, as always, by the Chorallaries of MIT — with the finale of “Take Me Back to Tech” as a community-sourced sing-along, incorporating MIT voices submitted via video wherever they are in the world. R. Erich Caulfield SM ’01 PhD ’06, president of the MIT Alumni Association, will offer a welcome to the association and introduce the scroll of graduates’ names. 

Thanks to the pioneering work of Senior Associate Dean Mary Callahan and her team at the Registrar’s Office, MIT’s online Commencement celebration on May 29 will include the delivery of digital diplomas to students who opt in. Although graduates will receive their physical diplomas at a later date, the establishment of the digital program in June 2017 meant that MIT was well prepared to issue diplomas remotely this year. MIT Open Learning is currently expanding the development of the digital diploma technology — built on research that originated in the Media Lab — with the Digital Credentials Consortium, an international network of leading universities.

Following the main Commencement program is a post-program comprising video and other content, developed by the MIT Alumni Association to honor its 3,500 new members. Victoria Gonin, executive director for alumni relations, participated with association colleagues in the planning. “This season is a defining experience for the graduates of 2020, and we know that will stay with them,” she says. “We want them to feel immediately welcomed by an alumni community who will benefit from their talents, perspectives, and experiences.”

Comusica: many voices, one MIT

This year’s Commencement music will feature a new element that requires a combination of tech savvy and artistic talent only MIT can offer: a composition made up of individual notes sung by members of the graduating class.

The Comusica project was born of conversations between Sarma; Gayle Gallagher, executive officer for Commencement; Leila Kinney, executive director of Arts Initiatives; and composer Evan Ziporyn, Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music, who had contacted Gallagher right away to ask how he and his colleagues in the Music and Theater Arts Section could help. Sarma wondered whether MIT’s musical forces might come together in a virtual concert, similar to online performances by orchestras worldwide in past months. Ziporyn was initially skeptical, given the technical challenges, but the more the group talked about creating a musical moment that could bring the community together, the more he committed to making the idea work.

Ziporyn turned to Eran Egozy '95, professor of the practice of music technology, who came up with the idea for Comusica: allowing students at all levels of musical ability to “perform” at Commencement by recording themselves singing individual notes, which would then be arranged like a mosaic into a larger piece.

Though it requires “7 million steps along the way, incorporating a lot of coding and editing on every level,” Ziporyn says, “the basic idea seemed really beautiful to me.” He composed a chorale which provides the structure of the piece, then Egozy charted out how many notes of each type and duration were needed. With help from Arts at MIT, the team started to solicit student participation. 

Professor Isaac “Ike” Chuang, senior associate dean of digital learning, joined the project early on, providing the extensive server infrastructure and coding behind Comusica’s submission website. “Sanjay [Sarma] brought me into the conversation about Commencement when they decided to do some of these interactive, engaging elements,” says Chuang, who brings deep expertise in building platforms for online communities. 

Egozy, whom Ziporyn describes as “an incredible field marshal,” took on the task of directing the project. Working with Media Lab graduate student Nikhil Singh, Egozy has spent the past six weeks tirelessly coordinating the many producers, audiovisual technicians, and web developers from organizations across campus involved in gathering, tuning, normalizing, and assembling the voices that make up the finished piece. On top of the extensive production expertise and support they are lending to the main Commencement program, MIT Video Productions Director Clayton Hainsworth and his team also contributed animations to Comusica.

For Egozy, the collaborative nature of the work is what makes it so compelling. “It just feels like one of these awesome MIT projects,” he remarks. “At first, you don’t know how you’re going to pull it off. But then you join forces with other colleagues who come together to help drive the project forward. I love the energy. I’m both a little nervous and really excited to show off Comusica at Commencement.”

Embracing the moment and looking forward

As engaging a program as this promises to be, the organizers know that nothing compares to being together on campus to celebrate the milestones Commencement represents. MIT has therefore committed to providing the Class of 2020 with an opportunity to celebrate in-person when it is safe to do so.

But for now, there is much to celebrate and much to look forward to in this new online experience — including a few new elements and surprises. Says Grimson, who has chaired the Commencement Committee for more than 20 years, “We’re so grateful for the collaboration of our scattered community: our speakers, the planning and production teams, the student musicians, and the creative faculty. Infinite thanks to everyone who persevered this season to make Commencement a joyful day that will honor our graduates.”

Perhaps the most enduring campus custom represented in this new event is MIT’s commitment to innovation. As Chuang says, “The ideas are based in the long traditions that MIT has for Commencement; we’re just doing them a different way.”

Sound and technology unlock innovation at MITSound is a powerfully evocative medium, capable of conjuring authentic emotions and unlocking new experiences. This fall, several cross-disciplinary projects at MIT probed the technological and aesthetic limits of sound, resulting in new innovations and perspectives, from motion-sensing headphones that enable joggers to maintain a steady pace, virtual reality technology that enables blind people to experience comic book action, as well as projects that challenge our very relationship with technology.

Sound as political participation

“Sound is by nature a democratic medium,” says Ian Condry, an anthropologist and professor in MIT’s Department of Global Studies and Languages, adding that “sound lets us listen around the margins and to follow multiple voices coming from multiple directions.”

That concept informed this year’s Hacking Arts Hackathon Signature Hack, which Condry helped coordinate. The multi-channel audio installation sampled and abstracted audio excerpts from recent presidential inaugural addresses, then blended them with breathing sounds that the team recorded from a live audience. Building on this soundtrack, two team members acted as event DJs, instructing the audience to hum and breathe in unison, while their phones — controlled by an app created for the hackathon — played additional breathing and humming sounds.

“We wanted to play with multiple streams of speech and audio,” says Adam Haar Horowitz, a second-year master’s student at the MIT Media Lab, and member of the winning team. “Not just the words, which can be divisive, but the texture and pauses between the words.”

A guy walks into a library…

What happens when artificial intelligence decides what’s funny? Sound and democracy played prominently in "The Laughing Room," an installation conceived by a team including author, illustrator, and MIT PhD candidate Jonny Sun and Stephanie Frampton, MIT associate professor of literature, as part of her project called ARTificial Intelligence, a collaboration between MIT Libraries and the Cambridge Public Library.

Funded in part by a Fay Chandler Faculty Creativity Seed Grant from the MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology (CAST), "The Laughing Room" invited public library visitors into a set that evoked a television sitcom living room, where they told stories or jokes that were analyzed by the room’s AI. If the algorithm determined a story was funny, it played a recorded laugh track. "The Laughing Room" — as well as the AI’s algorithmic calculations — were then broadcast on screens in "The Control Room," a companion installation at MIT’s Hayden Library.

While fun for the public, the project also mined more serious issues. “There is a tension in society around technology,” says Sun, “between the things technology allows you to do, like having an algorithm tell you your joke is funny, and the price we pay for that technology, which is usually our privacy.”

Using sound to keep the pace

How can audio augmented reality enhance our quality of life? That challenge was explored by more than 70 students from multiple disciplines who competed in the Bose MIT Challenge in October. The competition, organized by Eran Egozy, professor of the practice in music technology and an MIT graduate who co-founded Harmonix, the company that developed iconic video games Guitar Hero and Rock Band, encourages students to invent real-life applications for Bose AR, a new audio augmented reality technology and platform.

This year’s winning entry adapted the Bose’s motion-sensing AR headphones to enable runners to stay on pace as they train. When the runner accelerates, the music is heard behind them. When their place slows, the music sounds as if it’s ahead of them.

“I’d joined hackathons at my home university,” said Dominic Co, a one-year exchange student in architecture from the University of Hong Kong and member of the three-person winning team. “But there’s such a strong culture of making things here at MIT. And so many opportunities to learn from other people.”

Creating a fuller picture with sound

Sound — and the technology that delivers it — has the capacity to enhance everyone’s quality of life, especially for the 8.4 million Americans without sight. That was the target audience of Project Daredevil, which won the MIT Creative Arts Competition last April.

Daniel Levine, a master’s candidate at the MIT Media Lab, teamed with Matthew Shifrin, a sophomore at the New England Conservatory of Music, to create a virtual-reality system for the blind. The system’s wearable vestibular-stimulating helmet enables the sightless to experience sensations like flying, falling, and acceleration as they listen to an accompanying soundtrack.

Shifrin approached Levine two years ago for help in developing an immersive 3-D experience around the Daredevil comic books — a series whose superhero, like Shifrin, is blind. As a child, Shifrin’s father read Daredevil to him aloud, carefully describing the action in every pane. Project Daredevil has advanced that childhood experience using technology.

“Because of Dan and his engineering expertise, this project has expanded far beyond our initial plan,” says Shifrin. “It’s not just a thing for blind people. Anyone who is into virtual reality and gaming can wear the device.”

A beautiful marriage of art and technology

Another cross-disciplinary partnership in sound and technology that resulted in elegant outcomes this fall is the ongoing partnership between CAST Visiting Artist Jacob Collier and MIT PhD candidate Ben Bloomberg.

Bloomberg, who completed his undergraduate and master’s studies at MIT, studied music and performance design with Tod Machover, the Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media and director of the Media Lab’s Opera of the Future group. Bloomberg discovered Collier’s music videos online about four years ago; he then wrote the artist to ask whether he needed any help in adapting his video performances to the stage. Fortunately, the answer was yes.

Working closely with Collier, Bloomberg developed a computerized audio/visual performance platform that enables the charismatic composer and performer to move seamlessly from instrument to instrument on stage and sing multiple parts simultaneously. The duo continues to develop and perfect the technology in performance. “It’s like a technological prosthesis,” says Bloomberg, who has worked with dozens of artists, including Bjork and Ariana Grande.

While technology has opened the door to richer sound explorations, Bloomberg firmly places it in an artistic realm. “None of this would make any sense were it not for Jacob’s amazing talent. He pushes me to develop new technologies, or to find new ways to apply existing technology. The goal here isn’t to integrate technology just because we can, but to support the music and further its meaning.”

Explorations in sound continue into 2019 with the innovative annual performance series MIT Sounding. Highlights of the 2018-2019 season include a collaboration with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project in honor of MIT Institute Professor John Harbison’s 80th birthday, the American premiere of the Spider’s Canvas, a virtual 3-D reconstruction of a spider’s web with each strand tuned to a different note, and residencies by two divergent musicians: the Haitian singer and rapper BIC and the innovative American pianist Joel Fan performing works by MIT composers.

Arts benefactor makes lead gift for new MIT music buildingJoyce Linde, a longtime supporter of MIT and the arts, has made a cornerstone gift to build a new state-of-the-art music facility at the Institute.

“Our campus hums with MIT people making music, from formal lessons, recitals, and performances, to the beautiful surprise of stumbling on an impromptu rehearsal in the Main Lobby after hours,” says L. Rafael Reif, president of MIT. “Now, through a wonderful act of vision and generosity, Joyce Linde has given us the power to create a central home for faculty and students who make and study music at MIT — a first-class venue worthy of their incredible talent and aspirations. As a champion of the arts, Joyce knows the incomparable power of music to inspire, provoke, challenge, delight, console, and unify. I have no doubt the new building she has made possible will amplify the positive power of music in the life of MIT.”The new facility will be designed to meet the current and future needs of MIT’s music program and will house a new performance space. It will be constructed adjacent to Kresge Auditorium, which has served for decades as the primary performance facility for MIT Music and Theater Arts productions and for student arts organizations. With space for performance, practice, and instruction, the new building will further the Institute’s commitment to music education that ranges from conservatory-level training to classes that welcome complete novices. It also will consolidate many of the music program’s activities into one location and incorporate critical aspects of acoustical design for optimal listening, playing, and recording.The building’s centerpiece, a purpose-built performance lab, will provide a uniquely flexible, large-scale space for experimenting with various formats, including the ability to stage unconventional music events and employ flexible seating. In addition, the performance lab and a recording studio will offer professional-level recording facilities, a new resource for the MIT campus.

Other spaces that support the performance program include dedicated rehearsal rooms and additional student practice rooms. A music technology suite will include a classroom, research lab, and two student production labs. The building also will provide a rehearsal space for the world music program’s Balinese orchestra, Gamelan Galak Tika, and for its Senegalese drumming ensemble, Rambax.The building’s central location on campus reflects the core place that music studies and performance have in the lives of MIT students, explains Keeril Makan, the Michael and Sonja Koerner Music Composition Professor and section head of MIT Music and Theater Arts. “For the majority of MIT students, the Institute’s combination of a world-class science, engineering, and humanities education with superb music training is one key to their creativity, success, and well-being,” Makan says.“One fear I had about attending a tech school was that I would feel very out of place as a performing artist,” says Joy Fan ’20, a violinist who is majoring in computer science and molecular biology. “But thanks to the MIT music program and faculty, I am now actually more engaged with music: thinking about it in new ways, asking questions and analyzing works in an almost scientific manner — and experiencing music on a deeper level than ever before.”

In a typical year, more than 1,500 students are enrolled in MIT music courses, and music is among the most popular of the Institute’s 42 minors. After graduation, thousands of MIT alumni, across all fields, continue to perform and treasure music throughout their lives.“MIT has such talent on campus, and it is thrilling to help create a space that allows students and the community the opportunity to excel in music and the arts as well as science and technology,” says Linde. “It has been a pleasure to be part of President Reif’s vision to create an innovative learning space centered on music for students who are our future leaders.”Linde, along with her late husband, Edward H. Linde ’62, is a noted patron of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Tanglewood Learning Institute, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The couple previously endowed the Edward H. Linde Career Development Chair in MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning and, with their family foundation, contributed $25 million for undergraduate financial aid at the Institute.“Ed and I saw the power the arts can play in transforming young people’s lives,” she explains. “We witnessed the joy that music brings, and also the power of the creativity that it fosters.”“The new music building will be the most advanced teaching and performing space that the Institute has ever constructed, yet Joyce Linde is helping MIT to create much more than a building,” says Melissa Nobles, the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. “Through her generosity, we will have a center that facilitates the study, performance, and appreciation of music — and serves MIT faculty and students, as well as youth and other members of the Greater Boston community.”

MIT’s academic programs in music span performance, composition, history, culture, and theory. Courses explore connections between music and technology, science, society, linguistics, and other humanities disciplines. Beyond the classroom, more than 500 musicians participate in Music and Theater Arts’ ensembles, chamber groups, or advanced music pro­grams on campus in any given semester.

“The new Theater Arts building, W97, opened just over a year ago,” reflects Makan. “It has been astounding to see how a dedicated facility for theater-making has rapidly transformed that discipline on campus, opening up new areas of expertise and discovery. Just so, MIT’s new music building will be an active laboratory for what our music faculty have called the ‘synergies that arise from the confluence of great technical minds and extraordinary musical talent.’ The building will be a true place of ‘mind and hand,’ where our students and faculty can experiment at the frontiers of music and share their discoveries with our community and the larger world.”   

Imagination off the charts“Being at MIT consistently reminds me of how wonderful it is when people think beyond the surface level — up and down to other realms of things,” Jacob Collier said from the Kresge Auditorium stage on December 10, 2016.

The occasion was a three-hour concert and culmination of the multi-Grammy-winning musician’s residency with the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble. It was produced by the MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology (CAST) and with MIT Music and Theater Arts. The project began in the early fall of 2016 and grew to include a feature-length documentary.

“It was a kind of ‘perfect storm’ of circumstances and creative collaborations,” says Dr. Frederick Harris, MIT’s Director of Wind and Jazz Ensembles. “What happens when an extremely gifted musician connects with a brilliant music technology graduate student? They begin to build a unique instrument never before heard and tour the world with an innovative performance platform. And what happens when they collaborate with MIT musicians?”
A second home at MIT

Ben Bloomberg, a PhD student in the MIT Media Lab, met Collier in 2015. The two became fast friends and artistic collaborators. In addition to building Collier’s Vocal Harmoniser at MIT and creating his one-man-band performance vehicle, Bloomberg served as the balance engineer for "In My Room," Collier’s Grammy-winning 2016 debut recording.

Over the course of their collaboration, Collier’s appreciation for the Institute grew. “MIT feels like a second home to me now,” he says.

When Harris learned of their relationship, he began to craft a residency project that would allow MIT music students to engage directly with Collier and Bloomberg. To this end, Harris invited Jamshied Sharifi '83, an acclaimed composer-arranger-producer, to arrange some of Collier’s original music for jazz ensemble, choir, and full orchestra.

The fruits of that labor were on display at the December concert, which featured the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble with an orchestra and chorus of musicians from MIT, Berklee College of Music, New England Conservatory, Boston Arts Academy, and the University of New Hampshire.

“It was an historic evening at MIT,” said Sharifi about the performance. “I’ve heard or have been a part of concerts in Kresge for 37 years, and that night tops them all.”

The power of art

The story of the collaboration is told by director/editor Jean Dunoyer ’87 in a new documentary film, "Imagination Off the Charts: Jacob Collier Comes to MIT." The film chronicles Collier's artistic collaboration with MIT featuring rehearsals, behind-the-scenes footage, interviews with the artists, and portions of the live concert performance. It shares insights into Collier’s music, his work with MIT students, and a system — developed by Bloomberg, Peter Torpey, and Brian Mayton — that offers real-time improvisational direction to musicians through the use of phones.

“While making this film,” says Dunoyer, an editor-producer for MIT Video Productions, “I witnessed many immensely gifted people with a range of artistic skill sets bring enormous enthusiasm to this ambitious project. It was a testament to the power of art for bringing people together toward a positive and uplifting outcome.”

“Jacob is one of those once-in-a-lifetime kind of people who changes the way you look at things,” says Jeff Moran, a postdoc associate in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and a bassist featured in the documentary film.

Produced by MIT Video Productions, the film was made possible due to the generous support of Jane and Neil Pappalardo '64.

Creating “big, beautiful things”Garrett Parrish grew up singing and dancing as a theater kid, influenced by his older siblings, one of whom is an actor and the other a stage manager. But by the time he reached high school, Parrish had branched out significantly, drumming in his school’s jazz ensemble and helping to build a state-championship-winning robot.MIT was the first place Parrish felt he was able to work meaningfully at the nexus of art and technology. “Being a part of the MIT culture, and having the resources that are available here, are what really what opened my mind to that intersection,” the MIT senior says. “That’s always been my goal from the beginning: to be as emotionally educated as I am technically educated.”Parrish, who is majoring in mechanical engineering, has collaborated on a dizzying array of projects ranging from app-building, to assistant directing, to collaborating on a robotic opera. Driving his work is an interest in shaping technology to serve others.“The whole goal of my life is to fix all the people problems. I sincerely think that the biggest problems we have are how we deal with each other, and how we treat each other. [We need to be] promoting empathy and understanding, and technology is an enormous power to influence that in a good way,” he says.Technology for doing goodParrish began his academic career at Harvard University and transferred to MIT after his first year. Frustrated at how little power individuals often have in society, Parrish joined DoneGood co-founders Scott Jacobsen and Cullen Schwartz, and became the startup’s chief technology officer his sophomore year. “We kind of distilled our frustrations about the way things are into, ‘How do you actionably use people’s existing power to create real change?’” Parrish says.The DoneGood app and Chrome extension help consumers find businesses that share their priorities and values, such as paying a living wage, or using organic ingredients. The extension monitors a user’s online shopping and recommends alternatives. The mobile app offers a directory of local options and national brands that users can filter according to their values. “The two things that everyday people have at their disposal to create change is how they spend their time and how they spend their money. We direct money away from brands that aren’t sustainable, therefore creating an actionable incentive for them to become more sustainable,” Parrish says.DoneGood has raised its first round of funding, and became a finalist in the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition last May. The company now has five full-time employees, and Parrish continues to work as CTO part-time. “It’s been a really amazing experience to be in such an important leadership role. And to take something from the ground up, and really figure out what is the best way to actually create the change you want,” Parrish says. “Where technology meets cultural influence is very interesting, and it’s a space that requires a lot of responsibility and perspective.”Robotic spectaculars Parrish also loves building physical objects, and his mechanical engineering major has provided a path to many of his creative projects. “Part of my enjoyment comes from building things with [my] hands and being able to actually work in the physical world, and by studying mechanical engineering you get an invaluable understanding of how the physical world works,” he says. “I also believe strongly in the powers of computers to do things, so combining the two of [these areas] — basically programming mechanical things — is where I think I can get the most enjoyment.”Even before he joined MIT, Parrish was part of the Opera of the Future Group at the Media Lab. As a freshman, he worked on the “Death and the Powers” global interactive simulcast, performed at the Dallas Winspear Opera House. The scale of the show — performed live for a weekend in Dallas but broadcast to cities around the world — was immense. Six actors and a Greek chorus of robots moved across the stage, each controlled by “an undergrad with an Xbox controller.” The voices of performers were used to generate light projections on the walls of the set and theater.Parrish built a mobile app companion for the show, which distant viewers could use to give inputs and influence the performance. “If you were in the house, in the show, you would see all this lighting change, and you would feel the presence of all these other audiences that were around the world,” Parrish says. This was the type of work he had always dreamed of doing: using technological means of connecting people who care about the same thing.While delighted with MIT’s diverse resources, Parrish says he sometimes struggled to find a place that he could just go and draw at MIT — until he found the MIT Museum Studio, which he describes as “not really a makerspace, but an art and technology space at MIT.” He has become an advocate for the space, and used it to create a floor panel that reacts, with light, as users walk across it. Dubbed “Luminescence,” the system is one of the first projects that he conceived, designed, programmed, and constructed on his own.“Luminescence” was inspired by the bioluminescence of the James Cameron film “Avatar” and funded by the MIT ProjX Grant. Parrish is using the MIT Museum Studio to design his senior show, likely a nighttime spectacular. “I did the floor panel project in that space, and that has kind of been my companion to the Media Lab. I kind of generally sleep in both places,” says Parrish, smiling.Great engineering challengesParrish is quick to admit that his path through undergrad — particularly his constant creative expression at a technology school — has been atypical. But he has used each project and collaboration to further his lifelong dream of working as a Walt Disney Imagineer who helps create the Disney theme parks and other attractions.His connection to Disney began as a child. His family life was difficult, but every few years his mother and siblings would drive to Disney World. “You can escape and be around people who are always nice to you, and who are happy, and have fun and forget the rest of the world,” Parrish says. He would look at rides and shows, and know that he someday wanted to create his own. “I [knew I would] need to know how to build things, and how to understand art, and how to use art to impact people in a positive way. So I am studying music, studying creative design, studying drawing, studying mechanical engineering, computers, mechanical stuff, everything someone needs to know in order to be able to do that,” Parrish says.Last summer Parrish interned at Walt Disney Imagineering, where he worked on show control systems for new lands and attractions. “[Shows] have to be able to run reliably 18 hours a day, for 365 days a year, for 30 years straight. So, building systems that are that robust and still have creative intent is incredibly difficult,” Parrish says. “It was unreal to be able to see how you can build something at that scale and still actually achieve something meaningful and enjoyable, and fun and immersive.”Parrish added a theater concentration this fall, and has begun to formally study composition, arrangement, and directing.“I truly feel like I actually have the tools now to actually go out in the world and do stuff, build things, create change, create big beautiful things for people to enjoy, whatever kind of manifestation that takes,” Parrish says.No matter what type of work he’ll be doing at Disney or elsewhere, he says that his technical education — and the opportunities he has had to apply it — will be invaluable. “I am not going from problem sets to building rides; I’m going from robotic operas to [theme park] rides and shows. I can at least have a sense of ‘OK, this is how it’s kind of supposed to work.’”

MIT in London“Here in London, you can feel like you’re part of history and that you’re on the cutting edge at same time — it’s a great fusion,” says Noam Angrist ’13, a Rhodes Scholar who shuttles between the U.K. and Botswana on behalf of a development nonprofit he launched in 2014. Of London and the city’s immediate environs he says, “It’s where the old and new clash beautifully.”For MIT graduates like Angrist, whose professional lives span disciplines and continents, greater London proves to an ideal place to set up shop. Alumni find the city a welcoming place for international projects and for multidimensional endeavors that call on their education in the disciplines of MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences (SHASS), along with science and technical fields.“This is one of the few places in the world where I can do both music and science professionally,” says Elaine Chew SM ’98 PhD ’00, an accomplished pianist and professor of digital media at Queen Mary University of London.“Being here in London helps me be a global citizen, enabling me to stay in touch with both the East and West,” says Huma Yusuf SM ’08, an associate director at Control Risks, a firm that consults on political and cultural issues in the Middle East and Africa.London is home to a significant cohort of MIT alumni who are deeply engaged in the MIT mission “to make inspiring progress for the world,” in the words of President L. Rafael Reif, who will soon be visiting London for the next MIT Better World campaign event, which takes place on Jan. 13.As Reif emphasizes in conversations around the globe, advancing this vision requires “marrying advanced technical and scientific capabilities with a deep understanding of the world's political, cultural, and economic complexities."

It is in just such hybrid domains that Angrist, Yusuf, and Chew conduct their pathbreaking work.

Field-testing economics to improve young livesAs an economics and math major at MIT, Angrist became engaged in using quantitative tools to alleviate poverty. This focus flowed in part from his work in the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a research group founded at the MIT Department of Economics.Another spur for Angrist came from Amphibious Achievement, an after-school enrichment and rowing program he co-founded that aims to boost educational outcomes for urban high school students.On track for a PhD in economics, Angrist came to an important realization: “I also wanted to understand firsthand, out in the world, the kinds of problems I was working on in front of a computer screen,” he says. In 2013, he landed a Fulbright Scholarship based at the University of Botswana to explore the impact of age disparity in the classroom, and how to improve high school graduation rates. A pivotal encounter there opened up his path for pursuing real-world applications for economics.A university colleague in Botswana described a widespread phenomenon whereby “older guys give young girls gifts in exchange for unprotected sex,” Angrist says, explaining that “these ‘sugar daddies’ are a major driver of the HIV epidemic in Botswana, where one-quarter of the adult population has the virus.”Angrist immediately recalled a decade-old J-PAL paper demonstrating that in Kenya, a one-hour “sugar daddy” awareness class reduced pregnancy rates — and by proxy, unprotected sex and HIV rates — by one-third. “I decided then,” he says, “that it was time to turn research into action that affects real people.”By the following year, Angrist and three colleagues, Moitshepi Matsheng, Brenda Duverce, and Unami Moatswi, had launched Young 1ove, a non-governmental organization (NGO) dedicated to testing and scaling up the awareness class program and similar evidence-based efforts across the country. With what he calls a “youth army” of facilitators and a mandate from the government to reach every child, Angrist and his team have rolled out pilot programs, testing how effectively they slash HIV and teen pregnancy rates, as well as boost graduation rates. In this process, Young 1ove has, to date, reached 35,000 young Botswanans.“I’ve taken an unconventional path,” says Angrist, who is building the NGO while completing his dissertation research on development policy at Oxford University. “But at MIT I learned that I could work at the intersection of data and an organization that responds to the data and that actually helps people. This really is my happy place.”

Information and ethics in conflict-prone regionsIn her role at the London headquarters of Control Risk, Huma Yusuf assists groups who invest in conflict-prone regions of South Asia and the Middle East make “speedier, more ethical, legally sound, and politically savvy decisions,” she says.One recent project enabled a major relief charity to accept significant gifts from wealthy donors while avoiding attempts at corruption, and then deliver desperately needed help to a Middle Eastern war zone.With such projects she is “getting the best of both worlds,” says Yusuf, who also serves as a global fellow for the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington. “I research how things work on the ground, as well as help organizations work more transparently.”Comparative Media Studies (CMS), a SHASS program that focuses humanities research on the nexus of media, technology, and civic life, had a large hand in shaping Yusuf’s career. “The Internet and social media were taking off,” she says, “and I wanted to be at the forefront of understanding the implications of different media technologies on the ways power and information flowed.”Yusuf came to CMS in 2006 after doing investigative reporting on human rights, ethnic conflict, and media law for the Dawn Newspaper Group in her native Pakistan. “CMS was the only program for me because of the freedom MIT affords to take quite disparate approaches, meld them together, and find the right answer to a question.”With CMS colleagues, Yusuf helped to conceive and secure funding for the MIT Center for Civic Media, a joint venture between CMS and the MIT Media Lab dedicated to new technologies that support and foster civic media and political action around the world.As one of the first fellows at the center, Yusuf researched the impact of news and cultural media production on political dynamics in Karachi, Pakistan. This work, which became her CMS dissertation, serves as the foundation of a forthcoming book with the working title “Who controls the News? Media, Power and Identity in Pakistan.” Yusuf also continues her work as an international journalist focusing on digital technology and politics for notable publications.“In the CMS program I gained broad analytical skills, the confidence to work across disciplines, and the understanding of how to use new digital platforms to gather and critique information,” she says. “Rigorous academics combined with a practical orientation is what MIT does best — the real-life application of good ideas.”

Insights at the intersection of music and technology As a child learning to play the piano, Elaine Chew was captivated by classical music and the problem-solving possibilities it presents. Today, her work as a professor and a performer involves “making the music I love and the craft of music-making understandable for wider audiences.”In her classes on music and speech modeling, and in her research lab at the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London, Chew uses mathematical and computational modeling to illuminate the nuances that shape musical communication, from modulation of volume and phrasing, to subtle changes of color. “Thinking of musical coherence this way opens up a world of possibilities for performers, listeners, and composers alike,” she says.In essence, Chew’s research makes the ephemeral experience of music more concrete. “A music performance, especially when it is not recorded, leaves no real trace in the world,” she says. But by deconstructing and visualizing music performance — via computer renderings and concert conversations — Chew aims to bring “a different level of reality, of knowing, to people who are encountering a musical work for the first time.”

Her work in this area reflects the ethos of the MIT music program where she studied. “The MIT mission is to serve humanity,” says Institute Professor Marcus Thompson, “and the arts provide a powerful way for our students to grow in knowledge and understanding of the human condition.”  Chew pursued both music and mathematical sciences through her undergraduate years, and was drawn to MIT by its program in operations research and its conservatory-level music program. Pursuing both music and science at a high level, separately, was challenging, Chew says, but “Jeanne Bamberger [now professor emerita of music] saved me. She pointed me to research applying computer models to music, and I suddenly could see a lifetime of work cut out for me.”Chew found that her MIT advisors “had a strong belief about the deep connections between fields,” she says. “It was one of the only places in the world where this could have happened, and it was the start of my career.”“It is a great privilege,” she adds, “to be training the next generation of researchers. For a young, interdisciplinary field like music technology, individuals come with different combinations of subject knowledge and I take inspiration from Jeanne in working with students to develop meaningful research projects that build on what they know.”

London life

These dedicated alumni also savor the pleasures of London. Chew loves London’s music scene and her walks on the towpaths along the city’s canals. After the intensities of shaping plans for fraught regions, Yusuf finds restoration on rambles through the British Museum, where she admires the Japanese art collection especially. Angrist enjoys talking with fellow academics “over a pint in a historic pub where people in the past have produced extraordinary work.” He notes with admiration that, “History in the U.K. is very palpable.”For these and dozens of other MIT alumni, London is an extraordinary home for endeavors that inform policy, accelerate international cooperation, generate new forms at the intersection of art and technology, and help advance solutions to the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of today’s global issues. “MIT makes it possible to juggle the cerebral with action,” says Angrist, “and this means you don’t just sit behind a chair; you get stuff done. The more you do, the better the thinking, and the better the thinking, the more you do.”Learn more about the MIT Campaign for a Better World and the role of MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.Read a related story about the cross-disciplinary work of Nick Mabey SM ’93, the CEO and co-founder of London-based think tank E3G, who draws on skills he developed at MIT in his efforts to combat global climate change.

Story prepared by MIT SHASS Communications
Editorial Team: Leda Zimmerman and Emily Hiestand

Sharing a passion for music and interactive technologyWhile an undergraduate at MIT, Eran Egozy never took a class that combined his passions for computers and music. That's because when he was an undergraduate in the early '90s, there weren't any.

Today there are several, and Egozy '95, MEng '95 — who went on to co-found Harmonix Music Systems and launch the hugely successful video games "Guitar Hero" and "Rock Band" — is back on campus teaching one of them: 21M.385 / 6.809 (Interactive Music Systems), the first MIT music class that is also an electrical engineering and computer science class. The upper-level undergraduate course enables MIT students to explore audio synthesis, musical structure, and human-computer interaction. Ultimately, the students produce their own interactive music systems.

Using interactive technology to deepen music-making and experience

"I'm interested in ways of using technology to enhance a person's experience in either listening to or making music," says Egozy, who was recently named a professor of the practice in MIT Music, based in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

"People often experience music passively, by simply turning on a playlist in the background. But the inner workings of music are incredibly deep, and I believe every person has the capability of understanding and engaging with music in a much deeper way than they do now, even if they have not been formally trained."

At Harmonix, Egozy and co-founder Alex Rigopulos '92 SM '94 designed "Guitar Hero" to give users the experience of playing an instrument. Later games enabled players to re-create the experience of playing in a rock band or performing as a dancer. One of the pre-eminent game development studios in the world, Harmonix has developed more than a dozen critically acclaimed music-based video games.

Teaching interactive music systems

At MIT, Egozy says he hopes to continue researching ways in which computers can help people understand music while also helping students pursue their own passions — because he thinks that's the key to success. "We started Harmonix not because we wanted to make a bunch of money, but because we wanted to continue playing around with interactive music technologies after graduating," he says.

Although he is now full-time at MIT, Egozy still keeps in close touch with Harmonix and continues to serve on the company’s board of directors. Recently, Egozy had a chance to show his students the Harmonix ethos in action, during a tour of the studio. "It was a really fun day," he says. "The students got to see the inner-workings of Harmonix, and see demos of our products, some of which have not yet been released."

An accomplished clarinetist with the Radius Ensemble, Egozy first developed the Interactive Music Systems class for the spring 2015 term, when he came to MIT as a visiting artist. Eighty undergrads pre-registered for that first class, and Egozy admitted 16 students who gradually moved from simple programming tasks — such as creating a virtual harp that can be played with Kinect motion sensors — to their final project for the class: designing a system that incorporates sounds, graphics, and animation.

Algorithms for understanding music

Egozy expected the 2015 class to be a one-off, but he found he enjoyed teaching enormously. So, when he learned that MIT Music had an opening for a professor of music technology, he immediately applied. "This was the first time I had to actually apply for a job," he says. "It's pretty intense."

Egozy secured the position and officially joined the faculty in the spring 2016 term — when he again offered Interactive Music Systems. Now, he is developing a new undergraduate class focused on the algorithms that enable computers to understand music, and he is delighted to be back at MIT Music — "this hidden gem" that he discovered as an undergraduate.

Music and the MIT mission

"As an MIT undergraduate, I did not at all regret coming here, rather than going to a conservatory, which was the other choice I was considering," says Egozy, who received BS and MEng degrees in electrical engineering and computer science with a minor in music performance. "Once you're here, at MIT, you can do whatever you want."

The key, he says, is passion. "Why take a music class? It exercises the artistic part of your brain, which encourages creativity, and that creativity can certainly be applied to engineering and science," he says. "But I think students should take classes in the humanities and arts simply because they are rich and wonderful subjects. Ultimately, the truly great things that happen in the world happen when people pursue the work they love."

______________________________________

Story prepared by SHASS Communicatons
Editorial and Design Director: Emily Hiestand
Senior Writer: Kathryn O'Neill
Photograph of MIT student musician: Jon Sachs

Book explores the "Musical Institute of Technology"As many have discovered, MIT’s centers of excellence include the arts as well as the sciences and technology. One great strength of the arts at MIT is the Institute's music program, which welcomes all enrolled MIT students — regardless of major — and includes a conservatory-level track.

The vast majority of of MIT’s incoming students have advanced experience in the arts, most especially in music. For these students, MIT’s combination of a world-class science/engineering education and superb music training is one key to their creativity, success, and well-being — while at MIT and throughout their lives.

In any given year, nearly half of all undergraduates are engaged with the MIT Music program. Many students earn a major, minor, or concentration in music; after graduation, thousands of MIT alumni continue to perform in regional orchestras and chamber ensembles; and a notable group of MIT trained musicians go on to professional careers as composers, performers, and music scholars.

A recently published book, "Musical Institute of Technology," digs into the longstanding affinity for music at MIT. Along with insights from students and faculty, the book presents selections from an ongoing series of photographs by Jon Sachs, principal photographer for SHASS Communications.

"This is a marvelous book,” says Melissa Nobles, the Kenan Sahin Dean of MIT-SHASS. “Using the students’ own words it highlights the enormous value of music education here at MIT. The students who take our music classes are as diverse as the music itself. Yet, they all share a deep enthusiasm and appreciation for the intellectual, emotional, and cultural doors that music opens.”

The photographs, taken in rehearsals, classrooms, and concerts, feature the 10 performance groups in MIT Music. Accompanying text explores the significance of music in MIT's mission, including ideas about:

the intersection of music with technology, science, and linguistics;
why serious music training correlates with outsize success in other fields;
what accounts for the strong affinity between music and the STEM fields;
how music teaches collaboration and imaginative risk-taking;
how playing music develops cognitive powers that help us integrate ideas and help us become more aware of present and future contexts simultaneously; and
music as a lens on global culture.
An acclaimed music faculty dedicated to teaching

Reflecting on what makes MIT Music so successful, composer Peter Child, the Class of 1949 Professor of Music, and head of MIT Music and Theater Arts, points to a top-flight faculty that is 100 percent dedicated to teaching undergraduate students.

“That’s extremely unusual for a large research university,” Child says.

The caliber of MIT’s student body is another critical factor: “It’s an extraordinary phenomenon at MIT that an unexpectedly large percent of students are just very, very talented musicians,” Child says. “At the very top level, we have performers and composers who are so good they could thrive in a conservatory. We keep them challenged and enable them to progress to the highest level.”

A key to creativity, success, and well-being

In addition to instruction in music history, culture, composition, and theory, MIT Music provides opportunities for individual and ensemble performance. The 10 groups highlighted in "Musical Institute of Technology" include the Festival Jazz Ensemble; Concert Choir; Gamelan Galek Tika, a traditional Balinese orchestra; Vocal Jazz Ensemble; Emerson program; Rambax, a Senegalese drumming ensemble; Chamber Music Society; Wind Ensemble; Chamber Chorus; and the Symphony Orchestra.

MIT meets the needs of those at music’s top echelons through the Emerson Program, which provides select students with conservatory-level training.

“The Emerson Program has allowed me to study with one of the premier cello professors in Boston and perform annual solo recitals while pursuing a PhD in oceanography,” says Ellie Bors, one of many students an alumni quoted in "Musical Institute of Technology." “What a gift it has been to continue my musical studies at such a high level.”

Synergies of music, science, and technology

MIT offers music at every level, providing unusual opportunities even for novices. For example, at MIT, a newcomer to musicology can study with a scholar who works on the cutting edge of the field, and an enthusiastic but less experienced performer can play alongside fellow students who are heading toward careers in music.

“I look back on my time in the Vocal Jazz Ensemble as one of the major, defining parts of my MIT experience,” says Ben Bloomberg ’11, who is quoted in the book. “There are very few programs where it is possible to work so closely with such distinguished, prolific, and inspirational faculty.”

Faculty members point out that unusual synergies also arise from the confluence of great technical minds and extraordinary musical talent.

“Our students will be the ones to develop new theories of how people interact with technology as art, and art as technology," says Michael Cuthbert, musicologist, associate professor of music, and the creator of the Music21 computer tools.

“Every semester I witness something that just blows me away," says Evan Ziporyn, noted composer, clarinetist, and the Kenin Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music. "It could be an electrical engineering major who’s improvising jazz piano at a professional level, a classical cellist designing interactive music systems, or a class building gorgeous instruments from scrap parts."

Of the music/science connection, Andrew Wang '11 says, “My MIT classes in music theory and history transformed my understanding of music — and also deepened my relationship to the sciences.”

Elena Ruehr, an acclaimed MIT composer, notes that the musical experiences MIT students have also inform their work in other fields: “Studying music teaches discipline, discernment, and problem-solving," she says. "It makes your mind more fluid and gives you the ability to shift perspective, to see the same thing from many angles.” 

For non-performers, MIT Music also provides the community with dozens of opportunities to hear live music throughout the year. “Music has to be played, witnessed, and heard,” says Institute Professor Marcus Thompson, the Robert R. Taylor Professor of Music and an internationally recognized violist. “We understand that as part of our mission — sharing with listeners.”

The musical alumni of MIT

The end result of such offerings is that MIT Music, while not centered on training professionals, nevertheless boasts numerous alumni with successful musical careers — often with interesting technical dimensions.

For example, Andrew MacPherson, a double major in electrical engineering and music, who studied composition at MIT with Peter Child and John Harbison, is a noted composer of electronic music who teaches at the University of London's Centre for Digital Music, and is the creator of a hybrid acoustic-electronic instrument that augments the traditional grand piano.

Alex Rigopulos ’92 SM ’94, a former MIT Music major, and Eran Egozy ’95 SM ’95 joined forces to found Harmonix Music Systems, the company responsible for "Guitar Hero" and "Rock Band," which were among the most successful video games of the 2000s. In "Musical Institute of Technology," Rigopulos sums up what MIT Music meant to him: “MIT’s music program saved me as a person," he says. "I was lucky enough to be in this special environment where I could study science and engineering at a serious level and at the same time pursue music with great intensity. MIT provided an unusual environment where I could explore the intersection of both worlds."

Finding harmony with big dataIf you ever use Spotify, or a similar music-streaming service, there’s a good chance your song recommendations, and other personalized features, are powered by novel technology developed and marketed by two MIT alumni entrepreneurs. Brian Whitman PhD ’05 and Tristan Jehan SM ’01, PhD ’05 are co-founders of Echo Nest, whose technology — based on their MIT research — mines data from millions of songs streaming online. Sometimes called “the big data of music,” the company has compiled about a trillion data points from 35 million songs by 2.5 million artists. Its music-intelligence platform — recently praised in publications such as Fast Company, Wired and Business Insider, among others — then translates this data into information for music-app developers, who use the information to build smarter, more personalized music apps.Now, as a leader in the music-intelligence industry, Echo Nest has dozens of big-name clients, including MTV, BBC, Rdio, VEVO, Foursquare, Nokia, Sirius XM, Clear Channel’s iHeartRadio, Univision Radio and Intel. The company also provides third-party developers with access to this data via an application programming interface (API) that has become the technological blueprint for more than 400 apps, including iHeartRadio and eMusic.  “Early on, we always wanted an API for developers, instead of being this closed company, where only people who paid us could use it,” Whitman says. “The point of that is to see what people can build on top of our data. And there’s been some amazing things.”The co-founders say the company’s success is due, in part, to technology that predicted the growth of today’s booming online-music market — which ushered in a host of music-streaming sites and saw the growth of Internet radio. “When all that technology was rising around us, we were ready,” Whitman says. Combining music content and cultural analysisThe foundations of Echo Nest’s technology trace back to the MIT Media Lab, where the co-founders, then doctoral students, decided to combine their dissertations on music-data mining.Jehan’s dissertation, which he conducted in the Hyperinstruments Group, focused on the “content analysis” of music, extracting data on musical elements such as tempo, key and time signature. Whitman’s work — conducted under the tutelage of professor emeritus Barry Vercoe — looked at a “cultural analysis” of music, focusing on what different types of people were saying about music online.Seeing technological and commercial potential in combining the two projects, the co-founders mixed and tweaked their studies — a content-based and cultural analysis of music — and created what Whitman calls “a big database of what music sounds like to a computer, and what it means to people.” Now, when someone uses a music-streaming app that utilizes Echo Nest’s platform to, say, generate a playlist, Whitman says, “the site accesses both parts of the combined technology and says, ‘Here are the songs you should be listening to based on what we know about you and the music.’ At the end of the day, we tell people what music they should hear.”Most of the developer clients, for instance, use Echo Nest’s data to better understand listeners’ tastes and behaviors and create smarter music-streaming features, such as song recommendations, playlist generation, taste profiling, acoustic analysis, acoustic fingerprinting (an audio sample used to identify songs) and data feeds. But an additional perk of Echo Nest’s massive database, the co-founders say, is that it can help increase the visibility of rising Internet musicians who may have slipped through the song-recommendation cracks of earlier music-streaming services. For instance, MTV’s music-streaming service is using it to help listeners discover artists who may be popular on the Web, but who don’t get radio play.“We’re both musicians, and it’s frustrating knowing that an independent artist may not get noticed in music-streaming sites. We wanted to change that,” says Whitman, who recorded as an electronica musician before starting Echo Nest. Jehan is a keyboardist and guitar player who used to play in a Boston-based Brazilian band. From scientists to entrepreneursIn the company’s early days, the co-founders say they found support through MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service (VMS) and the MIT Media Lab, which helped turn them from scientists to entrepreneurs. Meeting regularly with business mentors such as Roman Lubynsky, VMS’s senior venture advisor, the two learned the basics for growing a company and were introduced to a variety of contacts, including lawyers, accountants and investors. “It was a very connected culture,” Jehan says. The co-founders say the MIT Media Lab also helped them make their technology accessible to investors — something foreign to some scientists, Jehan says. “Technology is not a product in itself,” Jehan says. “Some people don’t get that. The technology can be artistic, but you have to create artifacts people can grasp. We learned how to make it accessible to investors, or ‘productize’ it.”Whitman agrees, adding that the MIT Media Lab helped with patents and other legal issues. The experience taught him how to pitch ideas to the business community — something that helped Echo Nest acquire its initial investors. “As a scientist, being forced to explain your work to someone who’s not a scientist was a valuable lesson,” Whitman says.As scientists who freely accessed data for their dissertations, Whitman and Jehan have made sure to pay it forward, making some of Echo Nest’s data and technologies readily available for research purposes. In 2011, the company released a million-song dataset to academic institutions and released Echoprint, an open source music-identification system. “We come from the research world, and having access to data was really important,” Whitman says. “So, we’re trying to make sure that stays alive in our world.”

When it comes to fostering innovation, student group says 'Do it!'MIT fosters innovation and new ideas, but what if students don’t know what to do with their ideas or don’t understand approaches or methodologies for innovation? That’s where do.it@MIT — the Do Innovation team, a student-run organization focused on fostering innovation — comes in.Sneha Kannan, a senior in biological engineering, founded do.it@MIT as a program to encourage innovation by MIT students. “Our goal is to understand innovation,” she said. “We want to get everyone on campus aware of innovation and break down some of the barriers for those who are interested in being a part of it.”Since last October, do.it@MIT has been sponsoring dinner discussions with prominent innovators in a variety of fields. Free and open to the entire MIT community, the events have drawn more than 1,000 attendees. The speakers are asked to focus their presentations on innovation, and also the importance of learning from failure.“Traditionally, we’ve seen that underclassmen are worried about creating because they fear making mistakes,” Kannan said. “We hope to bring to MIT a culture of embracing failure as a necessary step to success.”Last year, do.it@MIT welcomed speakers from mechanical, software and biological engineering, and earlier this year hosted Dan’l Lewin, corporate vice president of Microsoft. This month, the group highlighted a different field when it hosted Fernando Garibay, a long-time collaborator with Lady Gaga and an executive with Interscope Records.“We thought Fernando was a departure from the people MIT typically brings to campus, so we jumped at the chance to host him,” Kannan said. “We thought he'd be a great choice because of his dynamic personality, as well as his prominent and fascinating work.”Garibay’s presentation focused on how the Internet has changed the way labels approach artists, as well as how consumers look at musicians. “Music has lost its value,” he said. “We lost the prestige because of how accessible our artists now are.”Garibay also talked about how labels are working to create a 360-degree management model that embraces this new Internet culture — using the Internet as a tool to reach more people in a variety of ways, from streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora to the use of smartphone apps working in tandem with albums.Nearly 150 students, representing a variety of majors, attended the event, which included a question-and-answer session at the end.“I thought it was very fascinating to get a glimpse into an industry that MIT students rarely hear about,” said Christina Qi, a senior studying management who attended the event. “Learning about the music-making process was eye-opening in that it's much tougher than one would expect. The event made me consider the changing relationship between music and technology in a new way.”do.it@MIT is continuing to host dinner discussions through the rest of the year. Its next event on Nov. 30 will feature Pranav Mistry, of the MIT Media Lab, who developed Sixth Sense, a wearable gestural interface that augments the user’s physical environment with digital information.Kannan said she hopes to continue expanding do.it@MIT’s programs so that more students can understand innovation in a variety of fields, as well as the difficulties they faced and overcame. “So many of the brilliant people who come to MIT to talk only talk about the successes,” she said. “I think it can be more worthwhile for them to talk about their mistakes, mostly because I find those lessons far more valuable.”

Composing for loudspeakers: computer music pioneer John Chowning visits MITIn 1967, late one night in the eucalyptus-scented hills of Palo Alto, John Chowning stumbled across what would become one of the most profound developments in computer music. “It was a discovery of the ear,” says Chowning, who gave a lecture and concert on Oct. 11 sponsored by the Media Lab and the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST). While experimenting with extreme vibrato in Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, he found that once the frequency passed out the range of human perception — far beyond what any cellist or opera singer could ever dream of producing — the vibrato effect disappeared and a completely new tone materialized.

What Chowning discovered was FM synthesis: a simple yet elegant way of manipulating a basic waveform to produce a potpourri of new and complex sounds — from sci-fi warbles to metallic beats. Frequency modulation (FM) synthesis works, in essence, by using one sound to control the frequency of another sound; the relationship of these two sounds determines whether or not the result will be harmonic. Chowning's classically trained ear had sounded out a phenomenon whose mathematical rationale was subsequently confirmed by his colleagues in physics, and would populate the aural landscape with the kind of cyborg sounds that gave the 1980s its musical identity.

Chowning licensed and patented his invention to a little known Japanese company called Yamaha when no American manufacturers were interested. While the existing synthesizers on the market cost about as much as a car, Yamaha had developed an effective yet inexpensive product. In 1983, Yamaha released the DX-7, based on Chowning's FM synthesis algorithm — and the rest is history. The patent would become one of Stanford's most lucrative, surpassed only by the technology for gene-splicing and an upstart called Google.

With its user-friendly interface, the DX-7 gave musicians an entrée into the world of programmers, opening up a new palette of possibility. Part of a rising tide of technological developments — such as the introduction of personal computers and the musical lingua franca MIDI — FM synthesis helped deliver digital music from the laboratory to the masses.

The early dream of computer music

The prelude to Chowning's work was the research of scientists such as Jean-Claude Risset and Max Mathews at AT&T's Bell Telephone Laboratories in the 1950s and '60s. These men were the early anatomists of sound, seeking to uncover the inner workings of its structure and perception. At the heart of these investigations was a simple dream: that any kind of sound in the world could be created out of 1s and 0s, the new utopian language of code. Music, for the first time, would be freed from the constraints of actual instruments.

As Mathews wrote in the liner notes of Music from Mathematics, the first recording of computer music, "the musical universe is now circumscribed only by man's perceptions and creativity."

"That generation," says Tod Machover, the Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media at the MIT Media Lab, "was the first to look at the computer as a medium on its own." But both the unwieldy, expensive equipment and the clumsiness of the resulting sounds — two problems that Chowning helped surmount — inhibited these early efforts (by Chowning's calculations, as he noted in his lecture, the Lab's bulky IBM 7090 would be worth approximately nine cents today). But by the mid-1960s, the research had progressed to the point where scientists could begin to sculpt the mechanical bleeps and bloops into something of musical value.

Frequency modulation played a big part. Manipulating the frequency unlocked the secrets of timbre, that most mysterious of sonic qualities. In reproducing timbre — the distinctive soul of a note — Chowning was like a puppeteer bringing his marionette to life. The effects of FM synthesis conveyed "a very human kind of irregularity," Machover says.

The future of music

Today, the various — and often unexpected — applications of FM synthesis are omnipresent, integrated so completely into everyday life that we often take them for granted– a ringing cellphone, for instance. Yet while digital technologies became more and more pervasive, Chowning's hearing began to worsen and he slowly withdrew from the field. For a composer whose work engaged the most subtle and granular of sonorities, this hearing loss was devastating.

Now, thanks to a new hearing aid, Chowning is back on the scene. The event at MIT on Thursday — titled "Sound Synthesis and Perception: Composing from the Inside Out" — marked the East Coast premiere of his new piece Voices featuring his wife, the soprano Maureen Chowning, and an interactive computer using the programming language MaxMSP. Chowning sees the piece as a kind of rebuttal to those who once doubted the "anachronistic humanists" who feared the numbing encroachments of the computer. In Voices, he says, the "seemingly inhuman machine is being used to accompany the most human of all instruments, the singing voice." The piece also sums up a lifetime of Chowning's musical preoccupations, his innovations in our understanding of sound and its perception, and the far-reaching aesthetic possibilities in the dialogues between man and machine.

At MIT, Chowning enjoyed meeting the next generation of scientists, programmers and composers, glimpsing into the future of music. "The machinery is no longer the limit," he announced to the crowd. Indeed, MIT has its own rich history of innovation in the field, as embodied by figures such as Professor Emeritus Barry Vercoe, who pioneered the creation of synthetic music at the Experimental Music Studio in the 1970s before going on to head the Media Lab's Music, Mind, and Machine group. "MIT is in many ways a unique institution," Chowning says, where, "cutting edge technology interacts with highly developed artistic sensibilities." In the Media Lab, Chowning saw the dreams of his generation pushed forward. One thing, in his mind, is clear: "music has humanized the computer."

Video: The Paradiso Synthesizer Video: Lucy Lindsey and Melanie GonickIn 1973, Media Lab associate professor Joe Paradiso was an undergraduate at Tufts University, and didn’t know anyone who had built an analog music synthesizer, or “synth,” from scratch. It was a time, he says, when information and parts for do-it-yourself projects were scarce, and digital synthesizer production was on the rise. But, he decided to tackle the project — without any formal training — and sought out advice from local college professors, including his now-colleague in the Media Lab, Barry Vercoe. Paradiso gathered information from manufacturers’ data sheets and hobbyist magazines he found in public libraries. He taught himself basic electronics, scrounged for parts from surplus stores and spent a decade and a half building modules and hacking consumer keyboards to create the synth, which he completed in the 1980s. That synthesizer, probably the world’s largest with more than 125 modules, is now on display in the MIT Museum. Every few weeks, Paradiso changes the complex configurations of wires connecting the synthesizer’s modules, called "patches,” to create a new sonic environment. The synthesizer streams live online 24 hours a day at http://synth.media.mit.edu; starting this week, visitors to the synthesizer’s website can even change the patch parameters online. Learn more about Paradiso’s synthesizer

Disembodied performanceLater this month, the Opera of the Future Group at the MIT Media Lab will premiere Death and the Powers, an opera more than 10 years in the making. Featuring life-sized singing robots and a musical chandelier, the opera could redefine how technology can enhance live performance and help reestablish opera’s spirit of innovation.Created by composer and MIT Media Lab Professor Tod Machover, who has designed customized instruments for musicians like Yo-Yo Ma and Prince, the one-act opera will premiere Sept. 24-26 in Monaco (the city-state’s ruler, Prince Albert II, is the honorary patron of the project and will attend the gala opening). More than 60 students and collaborators are traveling with Machover to help stage the complex production.

Video: Tod Machover and Dan Ellsey play new music at TED

With Death and the Powers, Machover seeks to expand the traditional definition of opera through the use of technology — but in a way that enhances the human presence on stage and therefore strengthens the bond between audience and performers. “In theater, technology has consistently pulled music in the wrong direction,” says Machover. Recalling a Taylor Swift concert he recently attended with his teenage daughters, Machover bristles at the way in which “gigantic mega-screens and boom-box-like audio systems” have come to overshadow human performers, creating an experience that “forces rather than entices.”For this project, Machover and his team attempted to use technology to bring the stage to life, almost as another character: Death and the Powers features an animated set and nine singing “OperaBots” that serve as the chorus and frame the narrative.Creating “The System”The opera tells the story of Simon Powers, a successful inventor who wants to ensure his legacy. To do so, he constructs “The System,” which makes it possible to download his memories and personality into the physical environment. As soon as Powers enters the system and disappears from the stage at the end of the first scene, the stage takes on his persona. His character expresses himself through giant bookcases with thousands of lights that move to the rhythm of the music, as well as a sinuous, light-emitting musical chandelier with resonant Teflon strings that can channel Simon’s presence while being strummed by his wife, Evvy.By capturing the essence of a performer whom the audience can’t see, Death and the Powers creates what Machover calls a “disembodied performance.” This is done using software that Peter Torpey and Elly Jessop, two PhD students in Machover’s Opera of the Future Group, developed to measure aspects of a singer’s performance that the singer is likely aware of, including volume and pitch, as well as those he or she may not be monitoring, including muscle tension and breathing patterns. These conscious and unconscious elements then become part of the look and feel of “The System,” whether it’s through the movement of walls and chandeliers, pulsating lights or specially designed sounds.

MIT Media Lab Professor Tod Machover discusses his robotic opera, Death and the Powers.Video: Paula Aguilera/Jonathan Williams/Nobuyuki Ueda/Yolanda Spínola Elías; additional footage/stills: Melanie GonickThis creative fusion of music and technology could reposition opera as an art form that embraces innovation, says Marc Scorca, president and CEO of Opera America, a nonprofit that serves U.S. opera companies. He notes that for hundreds of years, opera was known for welcoming innovation through new technologies and instrumentation. But that role was usurped in the late 19th century when film emerged as the most innovative art form; opera appeared staid in comparison.“I’m always cheering when I see opera once again reasserting itself as the richest tapestry for innovative, live art,” Scorca says.Not only does Scorca consider Death and the Powers to be groundbreaking because it tests the “definitional boundaries” of opera, but he also notes how rare it is for an opera to be conceived and produced outside the framework of a traditional opera company. The fact that Machover’s group at the Media Lab produced Death and the Powers “shows opera’s potent viability as a medium that has creative potential for anyone who is innovating in interdisciplinary art,” he says.While Scorca hopes that the use of technology in Death and the Powers will inspire other operas, Machover cautions that it will be some time before the opera’s influence is clear — either within the world of opera or beyond. He notes that many of his larger endeavors have had unexpected results, such as his audience-interactive Brain Opera, which yielded many of the technologies behind the Guitar Hero video game. Although Machover believes that techniques like disembodied performance will influence how emotions are captured and communicated in performances, he thinks that a major impact of Death and the Powers will be through its story and music. “‘Powers’ is packed with vivid melodies, quirky rhythms and pungent textures that I hope might stick in the ear, stir the imagination and resonate in unexpected ways,” he says.

3 Questions: Evan Ziporyn on his new operaWhile a master of many forms of music, Evan Ziporyn has a particular affinity for the sounds of Bali. Ziporyn, the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music, has been involved with Balinese gamelan - a kind of percussion orchestral music - since his 1981 Murray Fellowship from Yale University. In 1993, three years after coming to MIT as an assistant professor, he founded Gamelan Galak Tika, a popular performing group. Yet Ziporyn, a composer and musician, writes and performs music ranging from classical, hard rock, alternative to ensemble. He is a composer and soloist with the Bang on a Can All-Stars, a high-energy chamber ensemble, and has toured as a saxophonist with Paul Simon. Ziporyn now adds another credit to his lengthy resume: an opera based on a true-life story that combines Balinese and Western musical forms. "A House in Bali," based on a 1930s memoir of the same title, traces the roots of the West's century-long infatuation with Bali, through the true story of three Westerners - composer Colin McPhee, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and artist Walter Spies - during their 1930s sojourn in Bali. Ziporyn composed the music, which will be performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars and a Balinese gamelan directed by Dewa Ketut Alit, with choreography by Kadek Dewi Aryani. Marc Molomot, Anne Harley and Timur Bekbosunov will perform the roles of McPhee, Mead and Spies, respectively. "A House in Bali" (www.houseinbali.org) will premiere on June 26-27 in the Puri Saraswati, a part of the palace complex in the village of Ubud, Bali; it will be performed on Sept. 26-27 in the Zellerbach Auditorium at the the University of California, Berkeley. (See www.houseinbali.org.) The MIT News Office caught up with Ziporyn by e-mail while he was in Bali preparing for the production. Q: Why did you choose to create an opera as opposed to another kind of musical form? A: The word "opera" just means "works" - and to me it means total theater, a combination of all the performing arts - music, theater, dance, lights and costumes, etc. This is what it meant to Wagner as well, but that doesn't mean all opera has to sound like Wagner - not that there's anything wrong with that. I am in fact working with three opera singers (mainly from Baroque opera, as I prefer those vocal qualities), and the piece does tell a story, but I'm also working with three traditional Balinese singers, whose voices and mannerisms have nothing to do with western opera or, for that matter, western music. Q: What is your source material? What will the music be like? A: "A House in Bali" is based on a memoir of the same name by the first Western composer to travel to Bali, Colin McPhee. McPhee heard the first recordings of Balinese gamelan in 1928 and immediately went there to study and document the music. He did a tremendous job of it: his book and transcriptions are still considered the definitive source on the music of the period, both by Westerners and the Balinese. And he loved Bali. He came back to America as WWII loomed and, sadly, never got his life back on track. His own music was never the same, and he died without ever finding a way to return. He's a very important figure to me, both a model and a warning, and his story is truly tragic: unrequited love, but the object of affection is a culture, rather than a person. As with the singers, the instrumental music brings together two worlds. My own ensemble, Bang on a Can, is involved, and our instrumentation is basically a rock band with strings. Beyond that, I have a full Balinese gamelan - 16 musicians from the Ubud area - and the combination of these disparate sounds mirrors and frames the story. They come together and drift apart, mesh and clash - just as they do in my own imagination and, I think, as they did in McPhee's. Q: Is there anything that is particularly characteristic of MIT in the opera? A: Only that it's sui generis or "in a class of its own." There have been other operas that have employed Balinese music for color or exoticism, but I don't know of any piece that's interweaved these two cultures so extensively. There may be a reason for this; we'll find out.

Music at MIT hitting all the right notesLater this month, the MIT community will celebrate the 70th birthday of one of America's most prominent and prolific composers with a special tribute concert and symposium.That the individual in question, Pulitzer Prize-winning musician John Harbison, has been a member of the MIT faculty for four decades may come as a surprise to many in the outside world who tend to equate the Institute with white coats, computer algorithms, rocket science, quantum physics and cutting-edge efforts to cure cancer and solve the energy crisis.Harbison and the music scene at MIT are among the Institute's best-kept secrets, but they shouldn't be. Scientists and engineers have often been avid musicians — think of Albert Einstein and his violin or physicist Richard Feynman and his drums. The fact is, music at MIT plays a cathartic role in campus life and displays many of the bold characteristics — innovation, ingenuity, excellence and creativity — that lie at the heart of the MIT culture."Music at MIT is superb — and John is emblematic of that quality," says Associate Provost and Ford International Professor of History Philip S. Khoury, who has known Harbison for nearly 30 years. "He is one of the world's most distinguished and musically versatile composers, and he has always been completely devoted to teaching and, as he would say, learning from our remarkably talented students."An artist known for lucidity and logic in his compositions and performances, Harbison is equally adept at opera, choral and jazz. His Pulitzer Prize came in 1987 for his choral work "The Flight into Egypt," with text from the Gospel of Matthew. Two years later, he was awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant for his work, and in 1995 he became an Institute Professor — the highest honor MIT can bestow on a member of the faculty.Harbison, who is currently working on music inspired by Alice Munro's short stories, says MIT students bring with them the right ingredients for studying, composing and performing music: high intelligence, logical thinking, interest in structure and a curiosity about how things are made. In true MIT spirit, he tells students to break new ground and take risks."Go out and write things that your teacher won't necessarily approve of," he advises.Music on the MindWhether it's tinkering with music-editing software, performing in one of MIT's eight professionally led music groups or making brain waves audible, music at MIT can mean many things. In the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, associate professor Pawan Sinha and graduate students are working on way to create music and art from brainwaves. Intrigued with the possibility of understanding how minds extract meaning from sounds, Sinha has charted the electroencephalographic (EEG) response of brain neurons to tone sequences. Using a form of video gaming headsets that pick up these brain signals and by associating them with specific sounds, Sinha eventually hopes to allow an individual to "perform" in an orchestra simply by thinking. Sinha is also designing a "Your Brain on Music" program in which a person would watch a shifting electronic projection of EEG signals that reflects his or her brain's response to a piece of music. And, in what is perhaps his most ambitious project, Sinha hopes to design a "Brain Jukebox" that would let listeners hear music through the transformational lens of another person's brainSinha's research is in line with MIT's emphasis on interdisciplinary collaborations — and he is not alone in melding music with basic or applied research. Elaine Chew SM '98, PhD '00, an engineer and pianist who has designed algorithms for real-time analysis of music compositions based on mathematical models, and used them in her performances and lecture-concerts, says her engineering and music studies at MIT were entwined. "There are deep connections between the way the human mind works when making music, and when it solves problems in the sciences," she says. "Asking if my music studies help my engineering studies is analogous to asking a computational biologist if her biological studies help her statistical studies."Talented students, talented teachersChew's passion for music is fairly typical of the average MIT student. More than 60 percent of incoming freshmen declare advanced proficiency in a musical instrument, and at least 1,400 MIT students enroll each year in a music and theater arts class. As part of the Emerson Program for Private Instruction, the Institute offers scholarships each year to some 50 of its most talented scholar-musicians to pursue private instruction on their instrument with local master teachers.While only a few MIT students eventually pursue a full-time career in music, many graduates incorporate performance or composing into their professional and private lives. Such alumni include Eran Egozy '95, MEng '95, and Alex Rigopulos '92, SM '94, who founded the company that created "Guitar Hero." This hugely popular video game emerged from the pair's interest in providing a way for average people to express themselves musically through technology. "Students are engaged in music and the arts in general at MIT as they are with all their other academic work: with intensity, passion, commitment and rigor," says Fred Harris, director of wind ensembles and lecturer in music. "Over and over I am told by students and alums that it's the opportunity to explore, study, create and perform music that is among their most important, treasured and long-lasting experiences at MIT." Janet Sonenberg, professor of theater arts and head of the Music and Theater Arts Section, says much of the credit for MIT's creative music spirit goes to Harbison, who made it possible to attract an "extraordinary" group of arts faculty to MIT. Harbison, in turn, praises MIT for seeking to hire faculty with new approaches instead of being merely content to hand the baton to professors cut from the same template. Such hires include Evan Ziporyn, the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music. In 1993, Ziporyn founded the Gamelan Galak Tika, a Balinese music ensemble, not because it was logical for the Institute to have such a group but because he thought it would fit the Institute's quirky, expansive nature. "The kind of person that is going to seek out a Gamelan is similar to the kind of person who is going to seek out a robot club to build robots," he says. Teaching music at MIT was once thought to be about training the audiences of tomorrow, but today it's about letting students have all manner of musical experiences, says Ziporyn. Among other things, he has taught a course in computer music composition, in which students write music with computer-processed sound. Many of the students who take that course have little formal music training, but know far more about computers than he does, Ziporyn says. "One of the things I always love about teaching a computer music course is I would have all students in there making pieces of really weird music," Ziporyn says. "They ended up realizing, 'I can write a piece of music. Maybe I'm not Mozart, but I can write a piece of music.'" The Harbison celebration concert, which begins at 8 p.m., April 24 in Kresge Auditorium, is free and open to the public. For more information, please visit: http://web.mit.edu/arts/announcements/prs/2009/0212_Harbison.html.

A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on April 15, 2009 (download PDF).