Music know-how took heart stage at MIT throughout “FUTURE PHASES,” a night of works for string orchestra and electronics, introduced by the MIT Music Expertise and Computation Graduate Program as a part of the 2025 Worldwide Laptop Music Convention (ICMC).
The well-attended occasion was held final month within the Thomas Tull Live performance Corridor throughout the new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Constructing. Produced in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab’s Opera of the Future Group and Boston’s self-conducted chamber orchestra A Far Cry, “FUTURE PHASES” was the primary occasion to be introduced by the MIT Music Expertise and Computation Graduate Program in MIT Music’s new area.
“FUTURE PHASES” choices included two new works by MIT composers: the world premiere of “EV6,” by MIT Music’s Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor Evan Ziporyn and professor of the observe Eran Egozy; and the U.S. premiere of “FLOW Symphony,” by the MIT Media Lab’s Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media Tod Machover. Three further works have been chosen by a jury from an open name for works: “The Wind Will Carry Us Away,” by Ali Balighi; “A Clean Web page,” by Celeste Betancur Gutiérrez and Luna Valentin; and “Coastal Portrait: Cycles and Thresholds,” by Peter Lane. Every work was carried out by Boston’s personal multi-Grammy-nominated string orchestra, A Far Cry.
“The ICMC is all about presenting the most recent analysis, compositions, and performances in digital music,” says Egozy, director of the brand new Music Expertise and Computation Graduate Program at MIT. When approached to be part of this yr’s convention, “it appeared the right alternative to showcase MIT’s dedication to music know-how, and specifically the thrilling new areas being developed proper now: a brand new grasp’s program in music know-how and computation, the brand new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Constructing with its enhanced music know-how services, and new college arriving at MIT with joint appointments between MIT Music and Theater Arts (MTA) and the Division of Electrical Engineering and Laptop Science (EECS).” These not too long ago employed professors embrace Anna Huang, a keynote speaker for the convention and creator of the machine studying mannequin Coconet that powered Google’s first AI Doodle, the Bach Doodle.
Egozy emphasizes the distinctiveness of this event: “You need to perceive that this can be a very particular state of affairs. Having a full 18-member string orchestra [A Far Cry] carry out new works that embrace electronics doesn’t occur fairly often. Usually, ICMC performances consist both solely of electronics and computer-generated music, or maybe a small ensemble of two-to-four musicians. So the chance we may current to the bigger neighborhood of music know-how was significantly thrilling.”
To benefit from this thrilling alternative, an open name was put out internationally to pick the opposite items that might accompany Ziporyn and Egozy’s “EV6” and Machover’s “FLOW Symphony.” Three items have been chosen from a complete of 46 entries to be part of the night’s program by a panel of judges that included Egozy, Machover, and different distinguished composers and technologists.
“We obtained an enormous number of works from this name,” says Egozy. “We noticed all types of musical types and ways in which electronics can be used. No two items have been similar to one another, and I believe due to that, our viewers bought a way of how diverse and attention-grabbing a live performance might be for this format. A Far Cry was actually the unifying presence. They performed all items with nice ardour and nuance. They’ve a manner of actually drawing audiences into the music. And, after all, with the Thomas Tull Live performance Corridor being within the spherical, the viewers felt much more linked to the music.”
Egozy continues, “we took benefit of the know-how constructed into the Thomas Tull Live performance Corridor, which has 24 built-in audio system for encompass sound permitting us to broadcast distinctive, amplified sound to each seat in the home. Likelihood is that each particular person might need skilled the sound barely otherwise, however there was at all times some sense of a multidimensional evolution of sound and music because the items unfolded.”
The 5 works of the night employed a spread of technological parts that included taking part in synthesized, prerecorded, or electronically manipulated sounds; attaching microphones to devices to be used in real-time sign processing algorithms; broadcasting custom-generated musical notation to the musicians; using generative AI to course of reside sound and play it again in attention-grabbing and unpredictable methods; and viewers participation, the place spectators use their cellphones as musical devices to change into part of the ensemble.
Ziporyn and Egozy’s piece, “EV6,” took explicit benefit of this final innovation: “Evan and I had beforehand collaborated on a system known as Tutti, which suggests ‘collectively’ in Italian. Tutti provides an viewers the power to make use of their smartphones as musical devices in order that we are able to all play collectively.” Egozy developed the know-how, which was first used within the MIT Marketing campaign for a Higher World in 2017. The unique software concerned a three-minute piece for cellphones solely. “However for this live performance,” Egozy explains, “Evan had the concept that we may use the identical know-how to write down a brand new piece — this time, for viewers telephones and a reside string orchestra as nicely.”
To clarify the piece’s title, Ziporyn says, “I drive an EV6; it’s my first electrical automobile, and once I first bought it, it felt like I used to be driving an iPhone. However after all it’s nonetheless only a automobile: it’s bought wheels and an engine, and it will get me from one place to a different. It appeared like a very good metaphor for this piece, during which a number of the sound is actually performed on cellphones, however nonetheless has to work like some other piece of music. It’s additionally a little bit of an homage to David Bowie’s music ‘TVC 15,’ which is about falling in love with a robotic.”
Egozy provides, “We wished viewers members to really feel what it’s wish to play collectively in an orchestra. By this know-how, every viewers member turns into part of an orchestral part (winds, brass, strings, and so forth.). As they play collectively, they will hear their entire part taking part in comparable music whereas additionally listening to different sections in numerous components of the corridor play completely different music. This enables an viewers to really feel a accountability to their part, hear how music can transfer between completely different sections of an orchestra, and expertise the joys of reside efficiency. In ‘EV6,’ this expertise was much more electrifying as a result of everybody within the viewers bought to play with a reside string orchestra — maybe for the primary time in recorded historical past.”
After the live performance, visitors have been handled to 6 music know-how demonstrations that showcased the analysis of undergraduate and graduate college students from each the MIT Music program and the MIT Media Lab. These included a gamified interface for harnessing simply intonation programs (Antonis Christou); insights from a human-AI co-created live performance (Lancelot Blanchard and Perry Naseck); a system for analyzing piano taking part in information throughout campus (Ayyub Abdulrezak ’24, MEng ’25); capturing music options from audio utilizing latent frequency-masked autoencoders (Mason Wang); a tool that turns any floor right into a drum machine (Matthew Caren ’25); and a play-along interface for studying conventional Senegalese rhythms (Mariano Salcedo ’25). This final instance led to the creation of Senegroove, a drumming-based software particularly designed for an upcoming edX on-line course taught by ethnomusicologist and MIT affiliate professor in music Patricia Tang, and world-renowned Senegalese drummer and MIT lecturer in music Lamine Touré, who supplied efficiency movies of the foundational rhythms used within the system.
In the end, Egozy muses, “’FUTURE PHASES’ confirmed how having the precise area — on this case, the brand new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Constructing — actually generally is a driving pressure for brand spanking new methods of considering, new initiatives, and new methods of collaborating. My hope is that everybody within the MIT neighborhood, the Boston space, and past quickly discovers what a really wonderful place and area we now have constructed, and are nonetheless constructing right here, for music and music know-how at MIT.”
