The spectacular Blue Heron vocal ensemble performing in the MIT Chapel.
Post by Elly Jessop and Rebecca Kleinberger
As part of the Dalai Lama’s visit to MIT, the Opera of the Future Group performed an experiment in collaboration with the vocal ensemble Blue Heron, Affectiva, Elliott Hedman, and Tenzin Priyadarshi, director of the Dalai Lama Center at MIT. During Blue Heron’s stunning performance of early choral music on Monday, we used Affectiva’s Q Sensors to track and measure the reactions of selected singers and audience members over the course of the concert. The wireless Q Sensors, worn on the wrists or palms, measure the wearer’s skin conductance, which increases during emotional states such as anticipation, excitement, surprise, or anxiety. Through the information provided by these sensors, we can examine the similarities and differences in the affective reactions of various singers and audience members.
Tod and Elliott presented some of the affective stories of a few performers and audience members stories on Tuesday at the beginning of the Dalai Lama’s final talk at MIT. Continue reading
We wanted to share this lovely video footage from our archives. On June 2, 2002, Tod Machover’s Toy Symphony was performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony under the baton of Gerhard Markson. Renowned violinist Joshua Bell played a special “hyperviolin”. He shared the spotlight with kids playing Beat Bugs and Music Shapers, as well as a children’s chorus.
It’s wonderful what young people can achieve if just given the tools, encouragement and respect. Back on February 25, 2012, two of Armenia’s elite musical ensembles dig into new pieces composed entirely by children from Armenia and the United States. The children used Hyperscore software developed by the MIT Media Lab’s Opera of the Future group. The concert, “A-to-A: A World in Harmony,” featured the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra and DOGMA, one of the country’s most popular rock bands. The event was streamed live. Here’s the press release that describes the background of the event. The live stream was recorded and is now available for your viewing pleasure:
You never know what you’ll stumble across on the Internet. This week’s buried treasure come to light is this video clip from a presentation Tod Machover gave in 1996 at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. Visitors to the famous electronic arts festival had an opportunity to explore the interactive installation and take in a live performance of this landmark work. For more information about the Brain Opera, check out this website. It’s a bit outdated, but Tod says there are plans to refurbish the site with material from the digital archives.
The Economist has published an excellent article “A technology maestro,” about Tod Machover‘s work at the MIT Media Lab. The magazine’s web site includes an excellent video documentary. In the documentary, Tod explains how the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band motivated him to explore technologies that could bring the complexity and richness of studio-produced music to live performance. The documentary traces the trajectory of Tod’s ideas from the hyperinstruments he designed for world-class musicians to the Brain Opera and Toy Symphony which empowered children to create and perform music, and hyperscore technology that liberated Dan Ellsey to compose and perform music after a lifetime of being locked inside a paralyzed body. Most recently, his Media Lab team invented disembodied performance technology for the opera Death and the Powers. What’s next? Personal opera for the public, to be rolled out for the London Olympics?
Tod and I got together during an extremely rare moment of down time to shoot this interview a few days ago, right inside the beautiful Opéra de Monte-Carlo, or Monte Carlo Opera House. We had so much to talk about that I decided to cut up his interview into a few installments, starting with how Death and the Powers came to be – and like everything about this opera, the way it began was certainly atypical. I had been really looking forward to filming this interview, since the very first idea that blossomed into this opera started with Tod over ten years ago! Talking with Tod, who has been called “America’s Most Wired Composer”, was both enlightening and entertaining – hopefully this short video will give you some insight into what goes into creating a huge production like this one. Keep checking back for the next installment within the next couple of days!
Last weekend the cast and crew ventured out to Tod’s farm in Waltham, MA to film scenes from the memory download sequence. Directed by Matt Checkowski of The Department of The 4th Dimension, the shoot began in the early morning at the Media Lab and ended up out in Waltham at around 7 PM, at which point we were all ravenous and headed back to Boston to devour some Friendly Toast.
I could try to describe the picturesque farm, the care and precision put in by Matt and his team, or the goofiness of the singers, but it’d probably be much more effective to just show you:
Things have been advancing so quickly over the past few weeks – the singers have come and gone for the first rehearsal period, the walls of the set have come in, and robots are running around going crazy all over Castle Powers. So look out for lots more exciting updates soon!
So things have been pretty busy over here at Opera of the Future! Last week Iwas introduced to the creative team in a series of meetings aimed at evaluating the progress of the set, the music, and the singers. On Monday morning I sat in on a meeting with production designer Alex McDowell, technical director Peter Colao, visual designers Matt Checkowski and Peter Torpey, associate director Andrew Eggert, production development manager Bob Hsiung, research assistant Elly Jessop, and of course, Tod Machover himself. Since most of the creative team came in from scattered places all around the world – Los Angeles, New York, and Montreal to name a few – there was a lot of material to check in on, particularly having to do with the System, Simon’s three-paneled last invention that eventually absorbs Simon’s ideas, memories, and emotions.
The back-and-forth between the production team was incredibly fun to observe – Peter brought up the concern that the System might not fully incorporate Simon’s humanity (I think Matt put it best when he said “we don’t want it to look like an iTunes screensaver,”) to which Tod responded that hopefully this could be addressed by early rehearsals with Simon (played by James Maddelena). Alex noted that it would be important for the orchestra to have the emotional core of the system, at which point Tod asked: “are you saying that we literally want to plug the orchestra in?” Alex: “That’s what I think, yeah.”
The lab also just received the chandelier from Mystic Scenic Studios, the fabrication company in charge of building the sets. The piece itself is pretty awe-inspiring, and its actual arrival at the lab brought about new discussions about how to incorporate the several layers of the chandelier into the show – specifically, in how to reference the chandelier in the beginning of the show, its connection to the different points of the show, and how exactly to incorporate music into its design.
These meetings brought everyone together just in time for Sponsor Week at the Media Lab, which is the biannual gathering of corporations invested in all Media Lab projects. During this frenzied time, corporate sponsors come to the lab for a few days so that they can view demonstrations of current work, attend research group open houses, and attend talks by outside speakers. For the opera, it means several open houses displaying the robots, the chandelier, and the performance capture system; for me, it meant running around sticking my camera in people’s faces, hoping to capture each component on display and the spiel they were giving. Hopefully, this will give you a better idea of all the commotion than I can explain:
This week, Tod is in New York giving a presentation with Marvin Minsky at the Hayden Planetarium, so you’ll be hearing more from me once Tod gets back to Boston. Rehearsals start next week. Until then! (Additionally, by the next time you hear from me, I’ll be an MIT graduate. That part feels more surreal than a chorus of robots waxing poetic in song, but I guess stranger things have happened..)
"Mr. Machover's new quartet, "... but not simpler ...," is a vigorous, exciting study in speediness, full of tremolando figures, racing lines and iridescent passages.."
- The New York Times
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