As the Opera of the Future team heads into the final stretch of its ambitious Toronto Symphony project, it has released a brand-new web application called Media Scores. The system enables anyone to mold sections of composer Tod Machover's music like pieces of sonic clay, save their work, and share them with other users, including Machover. …
Continue reading "Wanna help write a symphony? There’s an app for that"
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 …
The Dalai Lama visited M.I.T. earlier this week to give a series of talks hosted by the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values. The Opera of the Future group in collaboration with Tenzin Priyadarshi, MIT's Buddhist Chaplain and Director of the Dalai Lama Center at MIT, and the Blue Heron vocal ensemble, produced a …
In mid-June, Tod officially launched his project with the Toronto Symphony at the ideacity 2012 conference. On the project blog, Tod explains the ideas behind his "launch music": To officially launch our A Toronto Symphony collaboration, I created a series of chords last month to serve as a kind of “genetic” code for the project, and also …
Tod's current project, "A Toronto Symphony", is about active, mindful listening to the world around us, in this case the city of Toronto. The composer asks the inhabitants to focus on the sounds that evoke strong feelings, images and memories about their city and their lives, raw sounds that he will transform into music. As …
Tod was in New York on Thursday recording a new song, "Open Up the House," for soprano and piano, commissioned by Opera America to celebrate the opening of the new National Opera Center in Manhattan next month. Forty new songs - a real cross-section of contemporary American music - have been created and recorded for …
Wow! What an invigorating and wonderful experience to hear Tod and eight musicians from the Toronto Symphony Orchestra get up on the ideacity stage on Thursday and perform brand-new music, created as the cornerstone for the Concerto for Composer and Orchestra. As Tod explained to the ideacity audience, he composed a chord progression one week ago, …
Interview by Jennifer Green, Project Manager for the 2013 New Creation’s Festival A Toronto Symphony project. Every March the Toronto Symphony Orchestra presents the New Creations Festival. Season curator and composer, Tod Machover, will create a new work that will be premiered by the orchestra in Roy Thomson Hall on March 9, 2013. The work will be …
Continue reading "Project Toronto – Genesis (Interview with Gary Kulesha)"
"I have just come to the end of two of the most exciting (and longest) weeks of my career," writes Peter Higgin, enrichment director at Punchdrunk. Writing in The Guardian, Higgin describes the culmination of the U.K. theater group's collaboration with our team at the MIT Media Lab to create an online enhancement for the hit New York …
Continue reading "Punchdrunk on its Media Lab collaboration"
Last week's experiment at the MIT Media Lab tested out a new system to allow the listening public to express musical preferences to a pianist who responded in real time. Tae Kim's tour de force of improvisation drew a highly engaged crowd both at the Media Lab and online, as well as some media attention. …
Continue reading "Prelude to Toronto – Crowdsourced piano improv"
Opera of the Future 