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Flying to the south
Life in space: Preparing for an increasingly tangible realityAs a not-so-distant future that includes space tourism and people living off-planet approaches, the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative is designing and researching the activities humans will pursue in new, weightless environments.
Since 2017, the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) has orchestrated regular parabolic flights through the ZERO-G Research Program to test experiments that rely on microgravity. This May, the SEI supported researchers from the Media Lab; MIT's departments of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), and Mechanical Engineering; MIT Kavli Institute; the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology; the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard University; the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media at Yale University; the multi-affiliated Szostak Laboratory, and the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology to fly 22 different projects exploring research as diverse as fermentation, reconfigurable space structures, and the search for life in space.
Most of these projects resulted from the 2019 or 2020 iterations of MAS.838 / 16.88 (Prototyping Our Space Future) taught by Ariel Ekblaw, SEI founder and director, who began teaching the class in 2018. (Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2020 flight was postponed, leading to two cohorts being flown this year.)
“The course is intentionally titled ‘Prototyping our Sci-Fi Space Future,’” she says, “because this flight opportunity that SEI wrangles, for labs across MIT, is meant to incubate and curate the future artifacts for life in space and robotic exploration — bringing the Media Lab's uniqueness, magic, and creativity into the process.”
The class prepares researchers for the realities of parabolic flights, which involves conducting experiments in short, 20-second bursts of zero gravity. As the course continues to offer hands-on research and logistical preparation, and as more of these flights are executed, the projects themselves are demonstrating increasing ambition and maturity.
“Some students are repeat flyers who have matured their experiments, and [other experiments] come from researchers across the MIT campus from a record number of MIT departments, labs, and centers, and some included alumni and other external collaborators,” says Maria T. Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research and SEI faculty advisor. “In short, there was stiff competition to be selected, and some of the experiments are sufficiently far along that they’ll soon be suitable for spaceflight.”
Dream big, design bold
Both the 2020 and 2021 flight cohorts included daring new experiments that speak to SEI’s unique focus on research across disciplines. Some look to capitalize on the advantages of microgravity, while others seek to help find ways of living and working without the force that governs every moment of life on Earth.
Che-Wei Wang, Sands Fish, and Mehak Sarang from SEI collaborated on Zenolith, a free-flying pointing device to orient space travelers in the universe — or, as the research team puts it, a 3D space compass. “We were able to perform some maneuvers in zero gravity and confirm that our control system was functioning quite well, the first step towards having the device point to any spot in the solar system,” says Sarang. “We'll still have to tweak the design as we work towards our ultimate goal of sending the device to the International Space Station!”
Then there’s the Gravity Loading Countermeasure Skinsuit project by Rachel Bellisle, a doctoral student in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology and a Draper Fellow. The Skinsuit is designed to replicate the effects of Earth gravity for use in exercise on future missions to the moon or to Mars, and to further attenuate microgravity-induced physiological effects in current ISS mission scenarios. The suit has a 10-plus-year history of development at MIT and internationally, with prior parabolic flight experiments. Skinsuit originated in the lab of Dava Newman, who now serves as Media Lab director.
“Designing, flying, and testing an actual prototype is the best way that I know of to prepare our suit designs for actual long-term spaceflight missions,” says Newman. “And flying in microgravity and partial gravity on the ZERO-G plane is a blast!”
Alongside the Skinsuit are two more projects flown this spring that involve wearables and suit prototypes: the Peristaltic Suit developed by Media Lab researcher Irmandy Wicaksono and the Bio-Digital Wearables or Space Health Enhancement project by Media Lab researcher Pat Pataranutaporn.
“Wearables have the potential to play a critical role in monitoring, supporting, and sustaining human life in space, lessening the need for human medical expert intervention,” Pataranutaporn says. “Also, having this microgravity experience after our SpaceCHI workshop ... gave me so many ideas for thinking about other on-body systems that can augment humans in space — that I don’t think I would get from just reading a research paper.”
AgriFuge, from Somayajulu Dhulipala and Manwei Chan (graduate students in MIT's departments of Mechanical Engineering and AeroAstro, respectively), offers future astronauts a rotating plant habitat that provides simulated gravity as well as a controllable irrigation system. AgriFuge anticipates a future of long-duration missions where the crew will grow their own plants — to replenish oxygen and food, as well as for the psychological benefits of caring for plants. Two more cooking-related projects that flew this spring include H0TP0T, by Larissa Zhou from Harvard SEAS, and Gravity Proof, by Maggie Coblentz of the SEI — each of which help demonstrate a growing portfolio of practical “life in space” research being tested on these flights.
The human touch
In addition to the increasingly ambitious and sophisticated individual projects, an emerging theme in SEI’s microgravity endeavor is a focus on approaches to different aspects of life and culture in space — not only in relation to cooking, but also architecture, music, and art.
Sanjana Sharma of the SEI flew her Fluid Expressions project this spring, which centers around the design of a memory capsule that functions as both a traveler’s painting kit for space and an embodied, material reminder of home. During the flight, she was able to produce three abstract watercolor paintings. “The most important part of this experience for me,” she says, “was the ability to develop a sense of what zero gravity actually feels like, as well as how the motions associated with painting differ during weightlessness.”
Ekblaw has been mentoring two new architectural projects as part of the SEI’s portfolio, building on her own TESSERAE work for in-space self-assembly: Self Assembling Space Frames by SEI’s Che-Wei Wang and Reconfigurable space structures by Martin Nisser of MIT CSAIL. Wang envisions his project as a way to build private spaces in zero-gravity environments. “You could think of it like a pop-up tent for space,” he says. “The concept can potentially scale to much larger structures that self-assemble in space, outside space stations.”
Onward and upward
Two projects that explore different notions of the search for life in space include Ø-scillation, a collaboration between several scientists at the MIT Kavli Institute, Media Lab, EAPS, and Harvard; and the Electronic Life-detection Instrument (ELI) by Chris Carr, former MIT EAPS researcher and current Georgia Tech faculty member, and Daniel Duzdevich, a postdoc at the Szostak Laboratory.
The ELI project is a continuation of work within Zuber’s lab, and has been flown on previous flights. “Broadly, our goals are to build a low-mass life-detection instrument capable of detecting life as we know it — or as we don't know it,” says Carr. During the 2021 flight, the researchers tested upgraded hardware that permits automatic real-time sub-nanometer gap control to improve the measurement fidelity of the system — with generally successful results.
Microgravity Hybrid Extrusion, led by SEI’s mission integrator, Sean Auffinger, alongside Ekblaw, Nisser, Wang, and MIT Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program student Aiden Padilla, was tested on both flights this spring and works toward building in situ, large-scale space structures — it’s also one of the selected projects being flown on an ISS mission in December 2021. The SEI is also planning a prospective "Astronaut Interaction" mission on the ISS in 2022, where artifacts like Zenolith will have the chance to be manipulated by astronauts directly.
This is a momentous fifth anniversary year for SEI. As these annual flights continue, and the experiments aboard them keep growing more advanced, researchers are setting their sights higher — toward designing and preparing for the future of interplanetary civilization.
There’s a symphony in the antibody protein the body makes to neutralize the coronavirusThe pandemic reached a new milestone this spring with the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines. MIT Professor Markus Buehler marked the occasion by writing “Protein Antibody in E Minor,” an orchestral piece performed last month by South Korea’s Lindenbaum Festival Orchestra. The room was empty, but the message was clear.
“It’s a hopeful piece as we enter this new phase in the pandemic,” says Buehler, the McAfee Professor of Engineering at MIT, and also a composer of experimental music.
“This is the beginning of a musical healing project,” adds Hyung Joon Won, a Seoul-based violinist who initiated the collaboration.
“Protein Antibody in E Minor” is the sequel to “Viral Counterpoint of the Spike Protein,” a piece Buehler wrote last spring during the first wave of coronavirus infections. Picked up by the media, “Viral Counterpoint” went global, like the virus itself, reaching Won, who at the time was performing for patients hospitalized with Covid-19. Won became the first in a series of artists to approach Buehler about collaborating.
At Won’s request, Buehler adapted “Viral Counterpoint” for the violin. This spring, the two musicians teamed up again, with Buehler translating the coronavirus-attacking antibody protein into a score for a 10-piece orchestra.
The two pieces are as different as the proteins they are based on. “Protein Antibody” is harmonious and playful; “Viral Counterpoint” is foreboding, even sinister. “Protein Antibody,” which is based on the part of the protein that attaches to SARS-CoV-2, runs for five minutes; “Viral Counterpoint,” which represents the virus’s entire spike protein, meanders for 50.
Markus J. Buehler · Protein Antibody in E minor
The antibody protein’s straightforward shape lent itself to a classical composition, says Buehler. The intricate folds of the spike protein, by contrast, required a more complex representation.
Both pieces use a theory that Buehler devised for translating protein structures into musical scores. Both proteins — antigen and pathogen — have 20 amino acids, which can be expressed as 20 unique vibrational tones. Proteins, like other molecules, vibrate at different frequencies, a phenomenon Buehler has used to “see” the virus and its variants, capturing their complex entanglements in a musical score.
In work with the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and PhD student Yiwen Hu, Buehler discovered that the proteins that stud SARS-Cov-2 vibrate less frequently and intensely than its more lethal cousins, SARS and MERS. He hypothesizes that the viruses use vibrations to jimmy their way into cells; the more energetic the protein, the deadlier the virus or mutation.
“As the coronavirus continues to mutate, this method gives us another way of studying the variants and the threat they pose,” says Buehler. “It also shows the importance of considering proteins as vibrating objects in their biological context.”Translating proteins into music is part of Buehler’s larger work designing new proteins by borrowing ideas from nature and harnessing the power of AI. He has trained deep-learning algorithms to both translate the structure of existing proteins into their vibrational patterns and run the operation in reverse to infer structure from vibrational patterns. With these tools, he hopes to take existing proteins and create entirely new ones targeted for specific technological or medical needs.
The process of turning science into art is like finding another “microscope” to observe nature, says Buehler. It has also opened his work to a broader audience. More than a year after “Viral Counterpoint’s” debut, the piece has racked up more than a million downloads on SoundCloud. Some listeners were so moved they asked Buehler for permission to create their own interpretation of his work. In addition to Won, the violinist in South Korea, the piece was picked up by a ballet company in South Africa, a glass artist in Oregon, and a dance professor in Michigan, among others.
A “suite” of homespun ballets
The Joburg Ballet shut down last spring with the rest of South Africa. But amid the lockdown, “Viral Counterpoint” reached Iain MacDonald, artistic director of Joburg Ballet. Then, as now, the company’s dancers were quarantined at home. Putting on a traditional ballet was impossible, so MacDonald improvised; he assigned each dancer a fragment of Buehler’s music and asked them to choreograph a response. They performed from home as friends and family filmed from their cellphones. Stitched together, the segments became “The Corona Suite,” a six-minute piece that aired on YouTube last July.
In it, the dancers twirl and pirouette on a set of unlikely stages: in the stairwell of an apartment building, on a ladder in a garden, and beside a glimmering swimming pool. With no access to costumes, the dancers made do with their own leotards, tights, and even boxer briefs, in whatever shade of red they could find. “Red became the socially-distant cohesive thread that tied the company together,” says MacDonald.
MacDonald says the piece was intended as a public service announcement, to encourage people to stay home. It was also meant to inspire hope: that the company’s dancers would return to the stage, stay mentally and physically fit, and that everyone would pull through. “We all hoped that the virus would not cause harm to our loved ones,” he says. “And that we, as a people, could come out of this stronger and united than ever before.”
A Covid “sonnet” cast in glass
Jerri Bartholomew, a microbiologist at Oregon State University, was supposed to spend her sabbatical last year at a lab in Spain. When Covid intervened, she retreated to the glass studio in her backyard. There, she focused on her other passion: making art from her research on fish parasites. She had previously worked with musicians to translate her own data into music; when she heard “Viral Counterpoint” she was moved to reinterpret Buehler’s music as glass art.
She found his pre-print paper describing the sonification process, digitized the figures, and transferred them to silkscreen. She then printed them on a sheet of glass, fusing and casting the images to create a series of increasingly abstract representations. After, she spent hours polishing each glass work. “It’s a lot of grinding,” she says. Her favorite piece, Covid Sonnet, shows the spike protein flowing into Buehler’s musical score. “His musical composition is an abstraction,” she says. “I hope people will be curious about why it looks and sounds the way it does. It makes the science more interesting.”
Translating a lethal virus into movement
Months into the pandemic, Covid’s impact on immigrants in the United States was becoming clear; Rosely Conz, a choreographer and native of Brazil, wanted to channel her anxiety into art. When she heard “Viral Counterpoint,” she knew she had a score for her ballet. She would make the virus visible, she decided, in the same way Buehler had made it audible. “I looked for aspects of the virus that could be applied to movement — its machine-like characteristics, its transfer from one performer to another, its protein spike that makes it so infectious,” she says.
“Virus” debuted this spring at Alma College, a liberal arts school in rural Michigan where Conz teaches. On a dark stage shimmering with red light, her students leaped and glided in black pointe shoes and face masks. Their elbows and legs jabbed at the air, almost robotically, as if to channel the ugliness of the virus. Those gestures were juxtaposed by “melting movements” that Rosely says embody the humanity of the dancer. The piece is literally about the virus, but also the constraints of making art in a crisis; the dancers maintained six feet of distance throughout. “I always tell my students that in choreography we should use limitation as possibility, and that is what I tried to do,” she says.
Back at MIT, Buehler is planning several more “Protein Antibody” performances with Won this year. In the lab, he and Hu, his PhD student, are expanding their study of the molecular vibrations of proteins to see if they might have therapeutic value. “It’s the next step in our quest to better understand the molecular mechanics of the life,” he says.
Navigating uncertainty through songIt was his first week on campus, and like most first-year students, Alberto Naveira felt overwhelmed. On top of the usual college fears, he felt trapped between two worlds — his familiar, small, Catholic high school in Puerto Rico versus his new life as an MIT student in Cambridge.
To regain a sense of comfort, Naveira chose to stick with the things he knew well. He spent his time with other Puerto Rican students. He declared a major in biological engineering to continue pursuing his lifelong goal of being a physician. Throughout the transition, Naveira held on to his past to stay grounded. “I was never the type of person to try new things. Suddenly, here I was in a completely different environment, language, and culture. I didn’t know what to do,” he recalls.
As the year went on, Naveira watched as his Puerto Rican classmates grew apart to find new groups of their own. Yet, he struggled to decide where he belonged. By the time he was a sophomore, Naveira knew he was lonely and needed a change. He thought back to high school, during moments when he felt most connected to a community. Most of these memories revolved around singing in his school’s choir. He realized he could revisit his passion by devoting himself to the Chorallaries of MIT, the Institute’s oldest co-ed student a capella group.
After joining, Naveira realized that getting to know members would require him to become more than just a performer. When the president position became available, Naveira realized this was his chance to step up. The demanding role immediately required him to spend countless hours with the group. “I started to feel closer to the others after we spent a good deal of time together coordinating performances. It was through these troubleshooting challenges that we began to actually bond,” he says.
As president, Naveira sought to make important changes to help newcomers like himself feel more welcomed. Along with planned social events, he focused on encouraging more casual get-togethers. “We would often go to the dining halls to catch dinner or brunch together. After performances, I always made sure that we’d acknowledge our accomplishments by having a celebration together,” he says. “They were little things, but I think they allowed us to become closer.”
Naveira also united members by facilitating conversations about the group’s shared traditions and values. When members advocated for new ideas, Naveira found himself championing their causes. “It was brought to my attention that our traditional song had lyrics that were heteronormative and lacked consent. There were also unnecessarily strict rules for the male performance dress code. By talking it through, we were able to make changes that were both fair and true to our customs.”
Throughout the year, Naveira began to see changes in himself as he developed into the role. He found himself speak up without fear, eager to listen and share his ideas. He was finally breaking out of his shell. “It took a while before I was able to confidently go in front of older members and make decisions. But the more time I spent on it, the better I got at projecting myself,” he says.
While coordinating the group came with challenging moments, Naveira grew to truly appreciate teamwork over singing solo. “There’s something to be said about living music as a social experience,” he says. “Like when you make eye contact with someone during a performance and there’s this shared intense emotion. It’s unlike anything else. You can’t have that on your own.”
Today, Naveira continues to be part of the Chorallaries as a performer, arranger, and audio mixer. Although he now feels at home at MIT, Naveira acknowledges that the process took dedication and self-discovery. He tries to spread this message to other struggling students he tutors through the Talented Scholars Resource Room (TSR^2) in the Office of Minority Education. “As I dug deeper into the communities that shared my interests, I started to feel more at home here,” he shares. “I try to emphasize this to my students whenever I can. If you feel like you haven’t found your place yet, it just takes some time.”
Naveira has also used his time in college to expand his original academic interest in medicine. He says the variety in his courses has shown him new ways of thinking, as well as career alternatives to becoming a physician. His favorite course, 20.309 (Instrumentation and Measurement for Biological Systems), encouraged him to investigate biology by applying principles from other engineering disciplines. “The interdisciplinary nature of the class showed me how medicine expands into other fields. We learned how something like signal processing can be applied to everything from medicine to music,” says Naveiro. “It blew my mind and made me rethink what I know.”
Over the past few months, Naveira has focused less on sticking to a defined path and more on pursuing what he loves. Stepping beyond music performance, he is currently pursuing a second bachelor’s degree in music production at Berklee College of Music. His new skills were used to arrange the Chorallaries’ most recent virtual performance, which won first place in the 2021 ICAA Northeastern Quarterfinal. Naveira plans on continuing to pursue music even after graduation. “Regardless of where I end up, I’m certain that I’ll never be happy unless music is part of my life. It’s something I truly value,” he says.
He also remains open to all types of career paths in medicine. Naveira loves the idea of continuing to apply knowledge from different disciplines to rethink medical problems. “The more I learn, the harder it is to choose a career in a specific field,” Naveira explains. “That’s something I never expected. I always knew that MIT would be a great place for me to grow as a researcher. But I never expected to grow as a musician, a tutor, a friend, and a person in general.”
“This past year has shown me that nothing is guaranteed. Life will always be full of uncertainty and I’ll be forced to try new things. But I feel that, with the right people by my side, I can handle anything.”
Woow Elgg
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 traditionThe 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 MITBen 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.’”
