Tod Machover and Musical Innovation

The MIT Media Research Lab, started in 1985, has fascinated me because it creates the future, or what the future could be. It brings together designers, engineers, artists, and scientists to work within research groups, which are then further divided into projects.

Here are the 25 research groups.

There are two research groups devoted to music:

"The Music, Mind and Machine group is working towards bridging the gap between the current generation of audio technologies and those that will be needed for future interactive media applications."

The other group, Opera of the Future, is headed by Tod Machover, whose ideas I want to discuss in this blog post.

The Opera of the Future group (also known as Hyperinstruments) explores concepts and techniques to help advance the future of musical composition, performance, learning, and expression. Through the design of new interfaces for both professional virtuosi and amateur music-lovers, the development of new techniques for interpreting and mapping expressive gesture, and the application of these technologies to innovative compositions and experiences, we seek to enhance music as a performance art, and to develop its transformative power as counterpoint to our everyday lives. The scope of our research includes musical instrument design, concepts for new performance spaces, interactive touring and permanent installations, and "music toys." It ranges from extensions of traditional forms to radical departures, such as the Brain Opera, Toy Symphony and Death and the Powers.

There are 16 projects in this research group. These are the ones that interest me the most:

Hyperinstruments

The scope of our research includes music instrument design, concepts for new performance spaces, interactive touring and permanent installations, and "music toys", and ranges from an extension of traditional forms, to radical departures such as the Brain Opera and Toy Symphony. (Here are some of the creations.)

Personal Opera

This development is based on two guiding principles: first, that active music creation yields far more powerful benefits than passive listening; and second, that increasing customization of the musical experience is both desirable and possible, as evidenced in our group's development of Personal Instruments (see Music, Mind, and Health) and Personal Music. Personal Opera goes a step further, using music as the medium for assembling and conveying our own individual legacies, representing a new form of archiving, easy to use and powerful to experience.

Hyperscore

Hyperscore is a graphical computer-assisted composition program intended to make composing music accessible to users without musical training as well as experienced musicians. The software maps complex musical concepts to intuitive visual representations. Color, shape, and texture are used to convey high-level musical features such as timbre, melodic contour, and harmonic tension.

Machover's work allows average people (who I have labeled "people formerly known as fans") to become more involved in music creation and participation.

Because not everyone is familiar with Machover, I wanted to do a blog post devoted to his ideas. I've pulled some quotes:

On giving untrained people easy-to-use tools.

Music exerts its power when we are actively engaged, not when we listen subliminally. For this reason, I have been working with my group at the MIT Media Lab to create musical tools – often with specially designed technologies – that enable everyone to participate directly in music-making regardless of background....

In my view, a prime example of the kind of new musical ‘ecology’ that we should seek is found in our culture’s relationship with cuisine. We all enjoy eating at three-star restaurants and admire the achievements of the world’s greatest chefs. At the same time, we do not hesitate to dive in ourselves to prepare special meals of high quality on special occasions. We also put together daily meals for ourselves, improvising content that reflects our personal styles. We enjoy eating and even studying the most ‘expert’ cuisine we can find, but are not scared to make and invent our own. In turn, the fact that we constantly prepare food ourselves makes us better understand and appreciate other food that we encounter.

Music – and most of the arts – has come very far from such a ‘healthy’ ecology, and it is this that we need to reinvent. Technology can help, as it can act as a bridge to each of us depending on our background and experience, taking advantage of our skills and compensating for our limitations. Even more importantly, we need to establish a fundamentally new partnership between all of the potential participants in our musical culture, including individual artists, all parts of the music business, technology, lifestyle, health and social organisations, music presenting and broadcasting entities, research institutions, artists-as-mentors and – last but not least – the music-loving public. Only in this way can we establish a culture that will allow music to reach its full potential in shaping and transforming our experience. Doing so will allow music to exert its most powerful possible influence on society at large. Surely we can imagine a world where music is at least as nourishing as a three-star meal? "Beyond Guitar Hero - Towards a New Musical Ecology," RSA Journal, January–March 2009.

"I think most people, given the opportunity and the right context and maybe the right tools, have far more ability to express themselves and to do original things than (1) they’re given credit for and (2) than they realize themselves,” he says. “One goal should be to help anyone who has a natural inclination to a certain kind of thing go as far as they can.” ...

“You want everybody’s talent to be developed to the fullest extent,” he says. “Even Mozart’s -- you want to find a way that, through the tool, the experience, and the culture, the person has every possibility to go further than he or she ever expected. But you want that for everybody."

... Machover says that he isn’t helping people become prodigies; he’s helping them become active amateurs. And raising the bar for everyone -- from virtuosos to those who sing in the car with the windows rolled up -- is nothing but beneficial. The good will continue to get better, and the general populace’s ability to appreciate the good will improve too.

“Right now, we have a culture where if there were a Mozart, you’re not sure that some large percentage of people would recognize it or know the difference, really,” Machover says with a laugh. “So there’s a real advantage in just having as many people as possible be open-minded and aware and pushing themselves as far as possible.” "Manufacturing Greatness," American Way Magazine, 1/15/09.

On the subject of stars and heroes and virtuosi, Machover accepted that every society naturally wants to help exceptional artists succeed, but that in our own, an unhealthy gulf exists between great artists and everyone else “just making things” and very visible on My Space. Not only now, he argued, but in the renaissance time of Byrd and Downland, their “genius” flowered in a rich culture of lots and lots of people able to make music. Similarly, Mozart and Beethoven were the best of a deep strata of musicianship. His final analogy was cuisine. We need, he declares, a new “ecology of music”, in which we have access to the 3-star, the takeout order, the home-made dinner and the quick-fix sandwich. This ecology depends on awareness – on teaching kids where music comes from “because if you made something yourself, in the right context, you really learn something about the value of doing it well” – and on stars and experts who “keep the level up” with their insights and skills. "The future of music and the future of design," Design & Society, 1/16/09.

On giving children more tools.

"It's so difficult, physically to learn a traditional musical instrument,'' he said. ''The smartest kids take a lot of time just to master the interface -- to say nothing of creativity -- before you're expressing something, and way before you're expressing something individual.

''I think that what I've tried to do in all this work is to emphasize creativity over virtuosity.'' ...

[The following is a comment in the article by its author, James Gorman.] When I tried the Beatbugs and Music Shapers I felt a tactile surge of pleasure more than an intellectual one. The instruments are, of course, less demanding than traditional ones, and in the end might be less enriching. But they are not designed as ends. They are designed to offer the pleasure of music before the pain of making fingers do unheard of things. "Playing Music as a Toy, and a Toy as Music," New York Times, 6/3/03.

He was inspired to develop Hyperscore after discovering how few music-instruction options existed for his young daughters. Although children are encouraged to tell stories without knowing grammar and to paint without study, years of rigorous training typically precede Junior's Opus 1. ''There seems to be a deeply embedded sense that you have to learn a lot before you can write music,'' he said.

So he set out to create software that would convert expressive gestures -- lines, patterns, textures and colors -- made on the screen into pleasing and variable sounds. The goal, he said, is to let children have ''the direct experience of translating their own thoughts and feelings into music.''

''Then music becomes a living, personal activity, and not a given which is handed down from experts or from history.'' "From a Few Colored Lines Come the Sounds of Music," New York Times, 5/27/02.

On creating an interactive presentation.

We are searching for something between top-down authority and complete anarchy--the interesting balance in between. We live in a very fragmented world in which people often feel out of control. What we are doing here is more than putting together notes of music; we are trying to touch people's lives. The hope is that art can provide a model for how people can come together and interact in other aspects of their lives.

The traditional concert model has all the work done on stage, finished ahead of time and then organized by the conductor--it is like the traditional model of the mind. As a result, of all the arts, music requires the most work because the imagination has to fill in all the details. The seriousness with which people approach music is frightening; we need to do something because people are forgetting how to listen." "Interview with Tod Machover,"Scientific American, 7/29/1996.

On making the world more musical.

I imagine musical instruments built into our environments - our furniture, clothing, walls, handheld objects - that will project our conscious and unconscious intentions onto our surroundings. A concert then would not be a special occasion but always around us, meaningful sound responding to our subtle commands, mirroring our attitudes, enhancing our actions at some moments, providing counterpoint or contradiction at others. Perhaps five or ten years down the line we will have developed a Home Opera, designed to be experienced in the place where one is most comfortable, completely vivid and theatrical, yet personalized for and by each individual.

[Glenn] Gould went even further, predicting that "in the electronic age the art of music will become much more viably a part of our lives, much less an ornament to them, and that it will consequently change them much more profoundly." Our goal is to figure out how - in technological, musical, and human terms - to turn Gould's fabulous vision into reality. "The Brain Opera and Active Music."

Two of Machover's former students, Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, founded Harmonix, which created Guitar Hero and Rock Band. They applied Machover's concepts.

When they formed Harmonix, their goal was to develop games that could make people feel like rock stars—in their living rooms. "The Making of The Beatles: Rock Band," IEEE Spectrum, 9/2009.

Machover would like to see them take their games even further.

"Imagine if [Guitar Hero] were truly expressive, truly personal, truly creative. The wonderful thing about Guitar Hero is that it opens up the door for everybody to be not just a passive listener but a real active participant in music," Machover says. "I think that is the future of music: music that is a collaboration between what we traditionally think of as composers and performers and the audience." "A Composer At The Edge Of Sound."NPR, 11/16/08.

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

Audience Participation in Music

Because I believe the distinction between artists and fans is dissolving, I've been covering the topic quite a bit -- in blog-sized bits.

I thought that today I would write about audience participation, which is one manifestation of this phenomenon. If you read no further, at least check out the Bobby McFerrin video at the bottom of the page. It has been making the rounds, so perhaps you have already seen it. But if not, it's worth a look.

Audience participation is certainly not a new concept, but it's useful to look at how it has evolved with technology. In his essay, Tom Ewing discusses popular British music in the late 1880s.

... pre-amplification: singers lacked the basic advantage of volume we audiences habitually cede to them now. So their music had to be a participatory one. You fought for and held the attention of a crowd on your verses, and the reward for their relative silence was to sing along on the chorus. And if you weren't up to snuff your verses would drown in a sump of backchat, shouting, fights and shrieks and rival tunes. Sing-alongs and audience participation were the heart of music hall ...

What happened to that energy? Music hall began its slow decline in the 1920s, battered by cinema and radio, shoring up flagging audiences with stripper acts that unraveled the threadbare respectability promoters had cultivated. Mass singing survived on football terraces and in pubs, though, and there was still enough pull in the idea of giving a crowd voice for the biggest band in the world to worry at it continually in the mid-60s. ... "Poptimist #1," Pitchfork, 2/20/07.

He goes on to say that the Beatles were influenced by that tradition.

"Yellow Submarine" isn't a music hall song, but it revives the hall ideal of audience participation. The Beatles' vision of the singalong was a communal release of positive, inclusive bonhomie; an extension and gentling of music hall's rowdy vigour. They kept coming back to the idea of involving and encouraging the audience. "The singer's gonna sing a song, and he wants you all to sing along"; "All Together Now"; and at last the most explicit (and weakest) attempt of all-- "All You Need Is Love".

... It goes back to that long-ago contract between performer and audience: the sense that a singer is there at a crowd's indulgence, and that his listeners have their own, highly vocal, role to play. Participatory populism, if you like, but with a sense of risk. There was always the real possibility that the singer would be sidelined by the audience noise, turned into an irrelevance-- or in the "War Song"'s case, would become the focal point for demotic currents they might not safely ride.

Around the time of the Beatles, music innovator John Cage wanted to change the rigid performer/audience relationship that had become the norm, especially in classical music.

One of the first artists to articulate a radically new aesthetic was John Cage. In his seminal early books, Silence (1961) and A Year for Monday (1968), Cage wrote eloquently (if at times obliquely) about a larger shift in the relationship between performer and listener. Music, he argued, could no longer be seen as something separate and detached from its listeners and from its context. Rather, creating music was a process that was initiated by the composer or performer, but completed by the audience. The listeners' experience of the work was essential to the music itself. "A Composer's Century," Andante, July 2002.

More recently, we have newer forms of music which incorporate audience participation.

I care about jazz way more than I care about European classical, and I lately care more about hip-hop than jazz. For me, it’s a simple matter of audience participation. In classical music, the audience doesn’t even get to applaud at the end of a movement. In jazz, there’s more interaction, but the audience is still mostly a passive recipient of information from the band. Hip-hop is all about group participation. I’m not talking about big stadium shows or TV here; I mean hip-hop as practiced on streetcorners and in clubs, where the mic gets passed around the circle and anyone who has the nerve takes a turn rhyming. I think the hip-hop cypher is as close as Americans get to the group improvisation of the stone age campfire. "Twitter, jazz and moving music forward into the stone age," Ethan Hein's Blog, 2/13/09.

I've just quoted three thoughtful essays on the state of music over the past 150 years. But what's intriguing to me are the number of articles that give tips to working musicians and DJs on how to get their audiences involved. Rather than essays, these sites offer practical advice. This is the part of the music business that most music futurists don't pay much attention to, but it's what a musical experience is all about for many people. The average person with a couple of kids probably isn't going to many (if any) rock clubs or big arena shows, but maybe he/she is catching a DJ at a wedding or hearing a local band at a free outdoor community concert. It's real life music.

Here are a few websites that I found:

Bill T's Top 20 Group Participation Songs

"Best Audience Participation Songs," JamsBio Magazine, 6/16/08.

"Audience Participation: Songs that make you wanna DANCE," illini_girl’s adventures, 6/27/08.

"Interactive Approaches for Karaoke," DJ University, 4/8/08.

Audience Participation Secrets

If you click on those lists, you'll see a number of songs that most of us know. That's one advantage of having mass media. People grow up hearing the same songs.

However that could change as music audiences split off into smaller niches. If we run out of universally-known songs, then artists/bands will have to depend on having a core group of fans who know the songs. Or who can learn new material on the spot. Some audience participation could evolve beyond playing popular cover songs.

To give you some idea of where band-led audience participation is headed, here's a VERY LONG AND IMPRESSIVE LIST of concerts where audience participation has been used. The list has been compiled on TV Tropes, a wiki where people contribute tips/ideas for a variety of creative media.

There are also other kinds of musical audience participation events. Two that involve movie theater audiences are the Rocky Horror Picture Show and the Sound of Music sing-a-long.

"Sing-A-Long Sound of Music" first emerged at the 1988 London Gay and Lesbian Film festival after an event organizer heard that staff at a retirement home in the Scottish town of Inverness had distributed song sheets during a video showing of "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers". The film festival's screening of "Sound of Music" and the sing-along proved to be unexpectedly successful, and it attracted the attention of theater producer David Johnson, who later joined forces with Ben Freedman of the Prince Charles Cinema to promote the project.

Later it developed into the "Sing-A-Long Sound of Music", the audience-participation phenomenon. Fans belt out "Do-Re-Mi" while dressed as Julie Andrews, or role play as a few of their favorite things.

Another form of musical audience participation involves having the audience create the music, which is more engaging than just singing along. This is being done most often with experimental music and with interactive computer-based music. (I will be mentioning some examples in my next blog post.) But there are also concerts based on very traditional music, often using drums or other forms of percussion. Here are two examples:

Manuel, the founder and director of Sewa Beats, a company based in the Vaud town of Morges, is organizing a concert at the Batiment des Forces Motrices to feature drummers from West Africa, 15 musicians from the Orchestre Symphonique Lyonnais and a unique form of audience participation.

“What makes the concert completely unique is that we are going to give everyone in the audience drums,” he told Swisster in a telephone interview from London.

People attending the November 6 event will be invited to beat out rhythms, under Manuel’s direction, to accompany the professional musicians in what he told Swisster is a “completely unique” programme. "Audience participation drums to a different beat," Swisster, 10/21/09.

The symphony consists of 19 separate musical lines requiring repeated drumming rhythms of 12 beats, augmented by occasional sung chants. With hundreds of invited drummers pounding away, you'd think El-Dabh would be worried about keeping things together. He's not.

"I just need the total sound. In Cleveland, I got that vibration whether they were on the beat together or not. Besides, there's a section where the chaos is intentional." "1,000 drums, one transcendent vibe," The Rocky Mountain News, 8/21/08.

There are also a number of theater productions that involve audiences to one degree or another. Some of the productions are very avant-garde or experimental, and others play to popular culture. Here's one overview.

"Popularity of Interactive Theater Is Changing the Face of Off Broadway," The New York Times, 4/22/97.

I have three reasons for wanting to explore fan involvement in depth:

1. As new technology allows them to do more media creation themselves, and as they come to expect more interactivity, fans are becoming more than just passive music consumers.

2. A lot of the new music business models are still based on the idea that music creators will sell to, and be supported by, fans rather than the idea that everyone may become a music creator/producer/promoter at some level.

3. Many musicians continue to assume that if they are good, their fans will sit and listen. These musicians are not preparing for a more interactive relationship.

Here's one musician's experience adjusting to this new dynamic, in this case having people in the audience tweeting while the band was playing.

When I saw the first negative comment I had the obvious sinking emotional reaction. This was a pretty basic comment that was really the first piece of harsh criticism we had received – and in writing – and in front of an audience of the three hundred people – and in front of all the tens of thousands of people watching on line. Oh yeah, receiving written criticism about your performance while in the middle of that very same performance is a first and weird too. So, when I saw the line “This band Sux!” it kind of took the wind out of my sails a bit.

About thirty seconds later though I was excited and amused when I had a flash of insight. We had suddenly been thrust to the level where people with no personal connection to us were moved to appreciate, judge, talk about, defend, protect, haze, fall in love with, and diss . . . It felt suddenly like an enormous step in the right direction. I started to beam. And people were rallying to say great things about us too. No matter what it just started to make me happy. "MC Hammer and Shorty Awards," tinpanbluesband.com, 2/12/09.

I'll wrap up this blog entry with two videos.

The flash mob has become one manifestation of audience participation. Not only does it involve a group of people performing at the event, if a tape of the event ends up on YouTube, then potentially millions of people become involved by forwarding the link to people they know.

For the beginning of Oprah's 24th season, her producers created an event that was the biggest single-city flash mob in history. On Facebook and Twitter they solicited Oprah fans who loved to dance. Eight hundred fans in Chicago volunteered. The day before the show, twenty professional dancers taught them the routine. And then the day of the show, those 800 taught 20,000 other people who showed up. In this clip, you can view not only the dance, but also some of that background preparation.



Finally, watch this Bobby McFerrin video. The point he is making isn't about audience participation per se, but it's a wonderful example of how effectively you can get people to join in.



Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

UPDATE, 1/9/10
Top 100 Piano Bar Songs

The Renaissance Musician

I've been exploring the idea that today's successful musician is expected to communicate well with fans in addition to writing and playing music. 

But after reading this by singer/songwriter Shaun Groves, I realized what we really want are renaissance musicians. We need them to be creative across multiple platforms.  

... labels are used to creating and maintaining the image of an artist: focusing and filtering, controlling who can and can’t have access, and how much, when and where. There’s one official bio and one fact sheet carefully crafted in a record company office and then parroted by every media outlet. That’s not possible on-line. And that’s distressing, fatal even, if an artist has nothing to say or, worse, has lots to say about things that don’t matter to anyone but them. Hair products, high priced jeans and guitar pedals aren’t all that interesting to folks with real jobs. The public is now discovering through an artist’s blog what publicists have known for quite some time and expertly covered up: This guy’s just a singer. And that’s no basis for a relationship. "If the Music Business Dies,"Shlog, 5/21/09

The online world accentuates the differences between those who are especially creative and those who are fundamentally dull and unimaginative.

Of course, we've always valued musicians who have pushed boundaries. The Beatles not only wrote and performed music, they starred in movies, they gave funny interviews, and they went on spiritual pilgrimages. In addition, Lennon wrote fiction, drew pictures, and staged performance art.

More recently we've had David Byrne who, in addition to founding Talking Heads and collaborating with Brian Eno, has scored operas and a ballet, started a record label, and exhibited art, photography, and design work in a number of galleries. 

And even more recently, we've had Nellie McKay who, in addition to being a critically acclaimed singer/songwriter, has performed on Broadway, has appeared in a movie, does book reviews for the New York Times, is a social activist,  and is currently scoring a musical.

Looking for examples of multi-taskers who are also very active online, there's John Mayer. He writes, records, and performs music. He's also written for Esquire, done stand-up comedy, and hosted a TV special. And he has become a Twitter celebrity.

Even more influential in cyberspace is Trent Reznor. 

Trent Reznor, frontman and mastermind of Nine Inch Nails, has become the poster boy for modern artist etiquette, having paved the way for an entirely new music business attitude through forward-thinking marketing concepts that center on communicating with fans directly, rather than the bureaucratic multilayered insulation of the past. Reznor never hides behind a larger-than-life character persona, instead representing himself as a real person, very frequently posting updates to his own site and sharing his insights/fears/hopes/frustrations with his fans directly. He's even active on Twitter. But as remarkable as that somehow still is, it's small potatoes compared to the bigger outside-the-box schemes Reznor's pulled in recent years. "Trent Reznor: Rewriting the Playbook," CraveOnline.com, 3/3/09

And someone I have cited in a number of blog entries is Amanda Palmer.

Flavorpill: Do you think of yourself as an artist, or as a musician, as someone who’s involved with theater, in literary endeavors, things like that.

Amanda Palmer: I don’t really think much about it. I know how I don’t feel. I don’t really feel like a songwriter, even though I do it all the time… I certainly don’t feel like a piano player. I feel like a hack in all of those categories. I’m also not an actress, and I’m not really a director. I’m not really a writer. But I do all of these things… When I clean my apartment, I clean one fork and one spoon, and then I go thumb through a book on the floor. I used to think that was fucked up, but now I realize that just how I work. I don’t feel so guilty anymore. And, you know, eventually it’s clean. The people that I saw when I was a kid, my idols – Cyndi Lauper and Prince, David Bowie – those people were never just doing one thing. I was lured into that particular job. "Amanda Palmer On Why Dresden Dolls Are Over and Roadrunner Is Out," Flavorwire, 5/20/09

So we may be missing the big picture if we put so much emphasis on social media as a music marketing tool. Many artists will bomb at it. The ones likely to excel will be those who are fundamentally interesting. It's going to be less important for an artist to look good. It's going to be much more important for an artist to be someone you'd like to be stranded on a desert island with.

Suzanne Lainson

UPDATE 6/10/09

Trent Reznor has decided to get off Twitter. 

What you've seen happen with the marketing and presentation of NIN over the last years is a direct result of living next to you, listening to you, consuming with you and interacting with you. Directly. There's no handlers or PR people here, it's me and my guys - that's it. There's no real plan, even - it's just trying to do the right thing that respects you the fan, the music, and me the artist. That's the goal - a mutual and shared respect.

When Twitter made it's way to my radar I looked at it as a curiosity, then started experimenting. I thought it through and in light of where I was / am in my career I decided to lower the curtain a bit and let you see more of my personality. ...

... The problem with really getting engaged in a community is getting through the clutter and noise. In a closed environment like nin.com a lot of this can be moderated away, or code can be implemented to make it more difficult for troublemakers to persist. It's tedious and feels like wasted energy doing that shit, but some people exist to ruin it for others - and they are the ones who have nothing better to do with their time. "Online communities, etc." NIN Forum, 6/10/09

UPDATE, 6/20/09

Here's part of a great interview with Amanda Palmer talking about being a multi-tasker.

I simply feel blessed that I’m an emotional exhibitionist right around the time is seems to be expected and en vogue. I love it - so I'm lucky. Plenty of musicians and artists out there AREN'T built that way, and so there's a level of unfairness.... I also feel lucky because I only loosely define myself as a musician. I got into music and taught myself how to play the piano and write songs as a means to an end - connection and art. I never wanted to be a great piano player, or a great singer.

It's closer to say I wanted to be a great PERFORMER. Of any kind. And performing via blog, twitter and twitpic is completely legitimate; it feeds my needs just fine. Whereas if I'd really been interested in just being an artist solely respected for my virtuosic musical talents (like, perhaps, a classical musician might), I might find all this connecting and online performing very bothersome. But I don't. I enjoy the medium it as a satisfying end in itself. If asked, nowadays, what I am, I could easily say "I'm a musician...and an online performance artist". Why not? "Interview: Amanda 'Fucking' Palmer (Part 1)," Hypebot, 7/20/09.