Tod Machover
Tod Machover
Tod Machover, is a composer and an innovator in the application of technology in music. He is the son of Wilma Machover, a pianist and Carl Machover, a computer scientist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMusician
Date of Birth24 November 1953
CountryUnited States of America
silence musical important
it's important as a composer to sit in silence and imagine these complex musical worlds in your head, but it's also a wonderful experience to touch your music and to hear it and hear it in the room with you and to say, you can't have an entire orchestra there, but you'd kind of like to have the orchestra there.
running thinking play
I think from age 13, 14, 15, I thought, yes, this rich studio produced music is the future, but it can't be the future to go run away into the recording studio. How can we take that kind of complexity and richness and make it possible for people to touch it and play it live. That's what hyperinstruments are.
teenager thinking juilliard
I think the seed was planted when I was a teenager, and it took me until I got out of Juilliard. At Juilliard I was just learning to be a composer, but I was also learning how to manipulate computers.
made interactive happens
There were a lot of things happen in the mid-'80's that all of a sudden made it possible to do a lot of very quick interactive music.
moving thinking play
I started thinking, my gosh, all this sophisticated software for measuring how Yo-Yo plays, and how he moves and this technique of the bow, I should be able to use similar techniques for measuring the way anybody moves, and so somebody who is not a professional or a trained musician, I should be able to make a musical environment for them.
technology expression ideas
The basic idea of a hyper instrument is where the technology is built right into the instrument so that the instrument knows how its being played - literally what the expression is, what the meaning is, what the direction of the music is.
art people acting
Works of art should be stimulating. They should wake people up rather than acting like a sedative.
years people design
Perhaps 25 to 50 years from now, I can design a piece of music, no so that it appeals to something common in millions of people, but I can design the music so that it's exactly right for you and only you at this particular moment for your particular experience, things that have happened to you over 20 years, to you're particular mental state right now.
mind
Nobody talks about music as having intrinsic meaning, how it engages the mind.
simple piano instruments
My work on hyper instruments started with simple instruments, like the piano.
journey voice brain
My message is to forget about dichotomies. The Brain Opera is an opera, even if it does not tell a story in the usual way. It is a psychological journey with voice - so I do consider it an opera.
opera different done
I've done a lot of operas. I've probably done more different kind of operas than anybody.
knows
All the music we know that's popular is actually commonly shared music that takes things that are similar about all of us.
technology rocks years
Over my career, I'd say the last 25 years; we've gone from music and computer being for 10 people in the world to having personal computers, to now being able to do amazing things on your iPhone, or with Rock Band. So, right now there's enormous capability with technology in our devices that everybody has access to.