40 Years of Music at the MIT Media Lab

Event Panelists Teresa Marrin Nakra, Professor and Director of the Music and Technology Program at Stevens Institute of Technology Alex Rigopulos, Co-founder, Harmonix Music Systems, Inc. Anna Huang, Robert N. Noyce Career Development Associate Professor of Music and Theater Arts and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT Ben Bloomberg, Grammy-nominated creative technologist and engineer Nicole L’Huillier, Transdisciplinary artist and researcher Tod Machover, Faculty Director, MIT Media Lab - moderator

The MIT Media Lab has been a center of bold interdisciplinary exploration for 40 years. A creative community of artists, scientists, engineers and designers, the Lab has innovated in areas as diverse as Affective Computing, Tangible Media, Biomechatronics, Sculpting Evolution, and Lifelong Kindergarten. Music has been at the absolute core of this culture since the very beginning, led by founding faculty Marvin Minsky, Barry Vercoe and Tod Machover and nurtured by several generations of contributing researchers, collaborating artists (from Yo-Yo Ma to Jacob Collier to the BSO), and truly remarkable students from around the world. This panel/presentation will bring together several generations of Media Lab music alumni in a discussion moderated by Tod Machover (whose latest work for orchestra and AI premieres with the BSO from October 22-24) that will explore what has made the Lab an especially fruitful environment for investigating out-of-the-box music technologies, forms and impacts (from the Hypercello to Brain Opera to Guitar Hero); what unusual trajectories and projects students have pursued post-Lab; and what this all might indicate for the future of music.