A technology maestro — from The Economist
A COMPOSER, inventor and educator, Tod Machover wears many hats. The son of both a pianist and a computer-graphics pioneer, his own career melds these two fields in a mix of music and technology.
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This led him to modify his own cello at 14, using headphones and an amplifier. A few years later, while studying composition at New York’s Julliard School in his early 20s, he learnt computer programming. “I definitely caught the computational bug,” he says. In 1978 Pierre Boulez, a French composer, invited him to work at IRCAM, a music research institute in Paris. Seven years later, Mr Machover joined the MIT Media Lab, where he still teaches. He also leads the affiliated Opera of the Future, a research group that explores ways “to help advance the future of musical composition, performance, learning, and expression”.
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So what’s next? After spending much of his career looking for ways to make music an active experience for all, Mr Machover predicts the future of the field is in personalisation. “I think more and more we will be developing music that can be customised for a particular person at a particular time,” he says, “almost like a prescription.”