Harmonix keeps innovating, with lasting impactEvery holiday season, a popular new video game causes a disproportionate amount of hype, anticipation, and last-minute shopping. But few of those games offer an entirely new way to play. Even fewer have ripple effects that reach far beyond the gaming universe.

When Guitar Hero was released in 2005, challenging players to hit notes to classic rock songs on guitar-like controllers, it grew from a holiday hit to a cultural phenomenon that taught a new generation to love rock ‘n’ roll music. Along the way, it showed the video game industry the power of innovative, music-based games.

Guitar Hero and the related Rock Band franchise were developed by Harmonix Music Systems, which formed more than 25 years ago in MIT’s Media Lab when a pair of friends began using technology to help people interact with music. Since then, it has released more than a dozen games that have helped millions of people experience the thrill of making music.

“The thing that we’ve always tried to accomplish is to innovate in music gameplay,” says Eran Egozy ’93, SM ’95, a professor of the practice in music and theater arts at MIT who co-founded the company with Alex Rigopulos ’92, SM ’94. “That’s what the company is constantly trying to do — creating new kinds of compelling music experiences.”

To further that mission, Harmonix became a part of industry giant Epic Games last month. It’s a major milestone for a company that has watched its games go from small passion projects to ubiquitous sources of expression and fun.

Egozy has seen Harmonix games on famous bands’ tour buses, in the offices of tech giants like Google, at bars hosting “Rock Band nights,” and being portrayed in popular TV shows. Most importantly, he’s heard from music teachers who say the games inspired kids to play real instruments.

In fact, Egozy just heard from his son’s school principal that the reason he plays the drums is because of Rock Band.

“That’s probably the most gratifying part,” says Egozy, who plays the clarinet professionally. “Of course, we had great hopes and aspirations when we started the company, but we didn’t think we would actually make such a big impact. We’ve been totally surprised.”

Mission-driven beginnings

As an undergraduate at MIT, Egozy majored in electrical engineering and computer science and minored in music. But he never thought about combining computers and music until he participated in the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program under then-graduate student Michael Hawley in the Media Lab.

The experience inspired Egozy to pursue his master’s degree at the Media Lab’s Opera of the Future group, led by Tod Machover, where he began building software that generated music based on intuitive controls. He also met Rigopulos at the Media Lab, who quickly became a friend and collaborator.

“Alex had this idea: Wouldn’t it be cool if we took a joystick that’s a more friendly interface and used it to drive the parameters of our generative music system?” Egozy recalls.

The joystick-based system immediately became one of the most popular demos at the Media Lab, leading the pair to participate in the MIT $10K Entrepreneurship Competition (the MIT $100K today).

“I think MIT imbued me with a sense that there’s no point in trying to do something that someone’s already done,” Egozy says. “If you’re going to work on something, try to do something inventive. That’s a pervasive attitude all around MIT, not just at the Media Lab.”

As graduation arrived, Egozy and Rigopulos knew they wanted to continue working on the system, but they doubted they could find a company that would pay them to do it. Out of that simple logic, Harmonix was born.

The founders spent the next four years working on the technology, which led to a product called Axe that Egozy describes as a “total flop.” They also built a system for Disney at the Epcot amusement park and tried to integrate their software with karaoke machines in Japan.

“We sustained multiple failures trying to figure out what our business was, and it took us quite a while to discover the way to satisfy our mission, which is to let everyone in the world experience the joy of making music. As it turns out, that was through video games,” Egozy says.

The company’s first several video games were not huge hits, but by iterating on the core platform, Harmonix was able to steadily improve on the design and gameplay.

As a result, when it came time to make Guitar Hero around 2005, the founders had music, graphics, and design systems they knew could work with unique controllers.

Egozy describes Guitar Hero as a relatively low-budget project within Harmonix. The company had two games in development at the time, and the Guitar Hero team was the smaller one. It was also a quick turnaround: They finished Guitar Hero in about nine months.

Through its other releases, the Harmonix team had been trained to expect most of its sales to come in the weeks leading up to the Christmas holiday and then for sales to essentially stop. With Guitar Hero, the game sold incredibly quickly — so quickly that retailers immediately wanted more, and the company making the guitar controllers had to multiply their orders with manufacturers.

But what really surprised the founders was that January’s sales surpassed December’s. … Then February’s surpassed January’s. In fact, month after month, the sales graph looked like nothing Harmonix’s team of 45 people had ever seen before.

“It was mostly shock and disbelief within Harmonix,” Egozy says. “We just adored making Guitar Hero. It was the game we always wanted to make. Everyone at Harmonix was somehow involved in music. The company had a band room just so people could go and jam. And so the fact that it also sold really well was extremely gratifying — and very unexpected.”

Things moved quickly for Harmonix after that. Work on Guitar Hero 2 began immediately. Guitar Hero got taken over by Activision, and Harmonix was acquired by MTV Networks for a number of years. Harmonix went on to develop the Rock Band franchise, which brought players together to perform the lead guitar, bass, keyboard, drums, and vocals of popular songs.

“That was really wonderful because it was about a group effort,” Egozy says. “Rock Band was social in the sense that everyone’s together in the same room playing music together, not competitively, but working toward a common goal.”

An ongoing legacy

Over the last decade, Harmonix has continued to explore new modes of music gameplay with releases such as SingSpace, which offers a social karaoke experience, and Fuser, a DJ-inspired game that lets users mix and match different tracks. The company also released Rock Band VR, which makes players feel like they’re on stage in front of a live audience.

These days Egozy, who’s been on the board since he became a full-time professor at MIT in 2014, teaches 21M.385/6.185 (Interactive Music Systems), a class that combines computer science, interaction design, and music. “It’s the class I wish I had as an undergrad here at MIT,” Egozy says.

And every semester, the class takes a tour of the Harmonix office. He’s often told it’s students’ favorite part of class.

“I'm really proud of what we were able to do, and I’m still surprised and humbled by the cultural impact we had,” Egozy says. “There is a generation of kids that grew up playing these games that learned about all this music from the ’70s and ’80s. I’m really happy we were able to expose kids to all that great music.”

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.”

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."

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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."