Rebecca Roberts, Springboard: Tod Machover is a Juillard-trained classical cellist who experiments with digital technology to create new musical instruments. His best known work is "The Brain Opera", a collection of squeezable, squishable digital instruments you can play with your hands. I recently visited Tod Machover at his studio at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where one of his graduate students showed me the new instruments.
Rebecca Roberts: You’ve got a bunch of cool-looking instruments here. Oh! What’s this guy?
Student: That’s a musical shaper. We use conductive fabric, and it can sense how you squeeze it. It allows children to play with [controls], with [radio] control.
Rebecca Roberts: Okay, so you squeeze it.
Student: When I squeeze it, [this forms]. [sound]
Rebecca Roberts: So, depending on what pressure you put on it, it makes different noises?
Student: Yeah. As you see, the screen here, you can see the different electrodes are being pressed, control different controls.
Rebecca Roberts: Alright, I want to play.
Tod Machover: I think that one of the things that I was always interested in was combining my love of performance as a cellist, the ability to spontaneously communicate through music with the audience and other musicians, and the ability to imagine a musical structure in my head. And I understood intuitively, from the beginning, that the great thing about technology was the fact that these are very malleable virtual machines. They can become anything you want them to be. I’ve always imagined that, for a particular piece or a particular project, I wanted to imagine the musical expression and feeling, then create a kind of studio, like a sculptor’s studio, where I could have the materials, the orchestra, the sounds in front of me, so I could touch them, change them and experiment with them, and also have them available as the instruments to perform with. I think that’s changed things enormously, the fact that music can go straight from your head into a brand new work and experiment situation, and then into an orchestra which is partly traditional, and partly completely new.
Rebecca Roberts: And in terms of new instruments, you’ve developed some hyper-instruments, like this hyper-cello over here. Explain the concept behind that.
Tod Machover: Again, what I wanted very much to do is get the best of both worlds. The credible communication and expression that musicians enjoy, whether you’re a professional or just enjoying music with friends, with a lot of the precision and power that new technology affords. I love recording studios, but I kind of got a really bad feeling at the end of the ‘80s, when we had things like the Milli Vanilli phenomenon, where you had people making CDs, where it turned out that not only were they lip-synching concerts, but they hadn’t actually performed anything. They didn’t lay down tracks on the CD, ever. So, that’s a bad thing, when music comes away from the human communication that is at the core of it.
So, with the hyper-instruments, what I’ve tried to do is to take the natural way that people make music, whether it’s a professional musician around a cello, or, more and more, what music lovers do with natural abilities, like moving your arms or touching or using your voice to measure those phenomenon, and to allow the computer to add on to your musical expression under your control. [sound] And it’s basically a beautiful sounding cello that’s very soft. This little piece is antenna. On the bow, it sends electricity from the two ends of the bow. The antenna tells how much electricity and where it’s coming from, so we can immediately tell where on the bow you are, how much bow you’re using, how fast it is, what the angle is. There are pressure sensors that measure how the bow is hitting the string, sensors that measure your wrist. All of these sensors measure your normal cello playing, but give, we hope, a better and better sense of what the interpretation is, what the feeling and expression is behind the playing.
Rebecca Roberts: Well, Tod Machover, thank you so much for being on Springboard.
Tod Machover: Thank you.
Rebecca Roberts: I appreciate your time.
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