I. Mind Forest (Marble Lobby of Juilliard Theater)
II. Brain Opera Performance (Morse Hall at Juilliard)
III. Net Music (World Wide Web at "http://brainop.media.mit.edu")
Music/Project Direction Video & Visual Direction Sets & Instrument Design Tod Machover Sharon Daniel Ray Kinoshita
Production Design and Direction Technology Design and Direction
Maggie Orth Joe Paradiso
Created and produced at the MIT Media Lab.
Sponsored by
IBM Corporation, NTT Data, Singapore Digital Media Consortium,
"Things That Think" Consortium of the MIT Media Lab, Interval Research, AT&T, Bloomberg News, InFocus, BayNetworks, David Shaw, MCI, NYNEX, WIRED Magazine
Sponsoring Co-Producers
Lincoln Center Festival
NTT Data/NexOpera Festival (Tokyo)
Singapore National Arts Council, National University of Singapore
Ars Electronica Festival (Linz)
Electronic Cafe International (Copenhagen)
Kravis Center for the Performing Arts (West Palm Beach)
For more detailed information on the Brain Opera, visit the project website at:
http://brainop.media.mit.edu
Thanks to Robin Willner and David Boor for helping to arrange and negotiate IBM's support of the Brain Opera.
Thanks to Masaki Mikami of Hakuhodo, Inc. and Yukiteru Nanase of We's Brain, both in Tokyo, for arranging support for, and a production of, the Brain Opera in Japan.
Thanks to Bobby Summerlin of Mystic Scenic Studios for helping us produce our complex sets and instruments efficiently and economically.
Many thanks to Robert Greene, Robert Bloomberg, Lauren Galant, and Laureen Fletcher of the MIT Media Lab for financial and administrative support and advice.
Special thanks to Neil Gershenfeld of the Media Lab for his scientific and technological guidance and for the generous use of his Physics and Media Lab; to RenÄe Levine for production and fundraising efforts; and to Carl Malamud for his exceptional help in connecting the Brain Opera to the 1996 Internet World Expo, and for helping to realize the on-line part of the work. The Brain Opera would not have been possible without their support and expertise throughout the project.
The Brain Opera is dedicated to John Cage, and to his joyful memory, creative integrity, and everlasting contribution to music and to our lives.
Brain Opera: Introduction
Composer Tod Machover believes that anyone can make music, and the Brain Opera - created by him with a team of over fifty artists/scientists at the MIT Media Lab - seeks to demonstrate this in a wholly new and original way, drawing audiences into the mysteries of how sensory perception, musical structure, language, and emotion interplay.
Inspired by the ideas of Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of Artificial Intelligence and a professor at the Media Lab, the Brain Opera is a highly interactive musical and artistic event. In his seminal book, The Society of Mind, Minsky theorizes that human personality and creativity emerge from the interaction among a multitude of loosely connected mental processes, rather than one centralized "conductor." Similarly, the Brain Opera has no linear story line, but draws on a multitude of inputs to define itself. "Like a traditional opera, this work has lots of voices," says Machover. "But unlike a traditional opera, the voices are amateur and professional, both in person and on-line through the World Wide Web."
To experience the Brain Opera, the audience first moves through an interactive Mind Forest in the lobby of the Juilliard Theater to play a variety of hyperinstruments, specially designed devices which are programmed to respond musically to each player's input. Then everyone moves into the adjacent Morse Hall theater for a 45-minute Performance. Each performance integrates music and sounds created by the audience in the lobby, music composed by Machover and played by Machover and two other performers (using innovate performance devices like the Sensor Chair and Digital Baton), and input from the Brain Opera's World Wide Web site. Although the core of the piece is Machover's composition, each performance is different, relying on the inspiration and input of whoever happens to be collaborating.
As John Cage said: "You can think of a piece of music as a representation of a society in which you would be willing to live." Based on Minsky's ideas of the mind and its relationship to music, the Brain Opera attempts to give audiences a concrete, unforgettable glimpse of a more fruitful way to live and work together, and to provide a musical experience that is stimulating and exciting, and just plain fun!
Part 1: Mind Forest (Interactive Lobby of the Juilliard Theater)
The Mind Forest is a complex space filled with hands-on experiences that turn body gesture and voice input into music (Tod Machover) and images (Sharon Daniel). The space was designed by architect Ray Kinoshita, and is intended to create the impression of walking, figuratively, into a giant musical brain. Organic shapes and materials designed by Maggie Orth, and responsive, invisible sensors invented by Joe Paradiso and his team, help make the environment feel natural and responsive rather than hi-tech and mechanical. These interactive experiences, which can be explored in any order, are:
1) Speaking and Singing Trees: The Mind Forest has fifteen such hooded "trees," each unique (try them all!) and offering a private experience to one person at a time. In the Singing Trees, wearing headphones to ensure maximum sound isolation, the individual sings a single note. The computer rewards a well-held, perfectly calm note with a beautiful aura, promoting a mood of concentration and meditation; a less-well-held note creates a more "agitated" musical response. In the Speaking Trees, audience members enter into conversation with Marvin Minsky and record personal memories and opinions, as well as thoughts about music and the mind. Each tree can record the audience member's voice, which is automatically edited, selected and processed, and then incorporated into each Brain Opera Performance.
2) Rhythm Tree: The Rhythm Tree is a sculpture with more than 300 networked drum pads mounted on seven giant, circular pods which stretch throughout the Mind Forest. Each individual pad is hand-molded in translucent rubber, and equipped with a special microprocessor and LED display. There is enough intelligence on each pad to allow variation in touch - from the slightest tap to the most powerful pounding - to produce a wide array of sonic results, all controllable with familiarity and skill. Each pad is also connected to many others, like branches on a tree (or synapses in the brain). As the player strikes them, different signals are sent ricocheting through the connected circuits, creating an everchanging variety of sounds and images.
3) Melody Easel: There are three Melody Easels, each designed to accomodate one player and two observers. Seated at a table-like structure, one plays the Melody Easel with the touch of a finger, creating a feeling of subtle articulation and phrasing usually associated with single-line melodic instruments like the violin or saxophone. The movement and touch of the finger as it travels across a specially designed transparent surface not only creates music - melodic variations and timbral filagrees based on the voice of mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt - but also a beautiful graphic trace.
4) Harmonic Driving: Using specially designed software, the player literally "drives" through a piece of music with one of three Harmonic Driving units. Like playing a traditional video game, the user negotiates onrushing paths and trajectories on a video screen, using a specially designed, spring-mounted steering column that measures turn and tilt and bend. Branches in the road - signaled by blue and orange barber poles - cause the music to become "cooler" or "hotter," and the player's micro-steering - whether rhythmic and precise or sinuous and meandering - makes the music become sharp-edged or atmospheric. Both path and music are updated on the fly as the player makes choices, and the consistency of these choices - or "conviction of the interpretation," if you will - is rewarded by a skill rating at the end of the run/piece.
5) Gesture Wall: Five larger-than-lifesize Gesture Walls turn body gestures into sound and image. By stepping onto a plate mounted invisibly in the floor, a low-voltage electric signal is transmitted through the player's shoes and then broadcast through the body to a set of four sensors located on goosenecks around the perimeter of a giant projection screen. These sensors measure body movement very accurately, allowing the slightest twitch or most dramatic dance to modify and "perturb" ongoing music and moving images displayed on the wall.
Part 2: Brain Opera Performance (Morse Hall at Juilliard)
The culmination of the Brain Opera experience is the 45-minute Final Performance. Here, a 3-movement composition ties together the project's many musical, visual, and textual strands into a unified tapestry. Three performers shape, select, and interpret precomposed and audience-created elements, using specially designed hyperinstruments: the Sensor Chair (which translates body movement into sound when seated on the special chair); the Gesture Wall (a modification of the same instrument from the Mind Forest); and the Digital Baton (which combines pointing, squeezing/selecting, and motion sensing). A large curved screen and multiple projectors allows a constant flow of images to be presented in coordination with the music, illustrating Minsky's words, providing counterpoint to the music, or illuminating the actions of the performers. The audience is also invited to dance on a Sensor Carpet during the Finale, adding sound to the richness and intensity at the end of the work. The Performance takes the following form:
Movement 1: The Performance starts with a whirling flurry of sounds and images collected from the audience. After this big bang, the music develops quietly as a kind of collage based on Marvin Minsky's ideas about the mind and music, and the audience's reactions to them, recorded from the lobby "Speaking Trees." The musical backbone is Machover's reworking of Bach's Six-part Ricercare from the Musical Offering, which returns at key moments of the Brain Opera. Fragments of music chosen by the audience are also intertwined, combining stream-of-consciousness listening, musical continuity based on harmony and texture, and suprising hybrids (like Bach/Beethoven/Bob Dylan or Stravinsky/Ellington/Beatles). With a complex polyphony of Minsky and audience voices, Movement 1 builds to a climax. As the "pseudo-Bach" reaches a C-Major cadence, audience singing voice recordings (from the "Singing Trees") are used to saturate the listening texture, bringing the music - featuring the voice of soprano Anne AzÄma - to a point of calm concentration and absolute stillness.
Movement 2: Whereas Movement 1 has the feel of the spoken word and concentrates on audience recordings, Movement 2 is a continuous piece of music with focus on the hyperinstrument performance. The movement starts with a gentle and lyrical section, drawn from the Melody Easel and based on the voice of mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt, in which short and simple melodic fragments are spun into longer and longer phrases, gradually turning into the themes which will be used for the rest of the piece. This is followed by "Minsky Melodies," a piece-within-a-piece, which turns the main libretto from the Brain Opera into song and animated "expressive text" illustrations, with vocal lines recorded by Karol Bennett and Chris Nomura. A buildup leads to the "Brain Opera Theme Song," with wordless melody sung by Karol Bennett, which brings together disjunct motifs from throughout the Mind Forest to create an energetic and syncopated number. Getting ever faster, music from Harmonic Driving is incorporated to provide a rushing climax to Movement 2.
Movement 3 starts with a dramatic gesture, as the three hyper-performers pause and give way to a flood of music coming live from the Brain Opera website on the Internet. A composition generator is manipulated by all web players, who push and pull its parameters to create a steady stream of complex music. After this "Internet Solo," the performers rejoin the action and start a dialogue with the net, sending music back and forth. The music that follows is the most improvisatory of the Brain Opera, with performers reacting to the net music being received, and adjusting it to an ongoing harmonic flow. One by one, all the elements from the Brain Opera are brought back into play, no longer as a collage but as a kind of chorale prelude, with distinct layers coexisting in a single, evolving counterpoint. The intensity builds gradually, leading to a return of the "pseudo-Bach" music from Movement 1, this time at greatly accelerated tempo, accompanied by a cantus firmus embellished by on-line players, and a layer of wildly rhythmic music stimulated by audience members moving on the "Sensor Carpet." A resounding C-major harmony is reached, where speech, ambient sound, audience-composed music from the Internet, percussion, noise, and solo and choral singing, all fuse into a collaborative unity. The Brain Opera ends with a quiet Coda, that almost resolves as one might expect, yet leaves the chromatic ambiguity of Bach's Ricercare theme resonating in the mind.
Part 3: Internet (http://brainop.media.mit.edu)
The Brain Opera website serves as an introduction for those wishing to attend live Brain Opera performances, as a reinforcement for those who have already been or plan to revisit, and as a way for people to participate on-line in Brain Opera performances. The interactive Java applets used in the Brain Opera were designed by Eric MÄtois, John Yu, and Andrew Garcia, with help from Carl Malamud. These applets let web players experiment with hyperinstruments, and also to play communal instruments - using MÄtois' Web Star Server - to create music to be sent live to Lincoln Center performances. Music and sound can also be prepared off-line through the website, and submitted at any time for inclusion in Movement 3 of the piece. The Brain Opera is a featured event in the Internet 1996 World Exposition (http://park.org/). This world's fair for the information age has participation from over 50 countries and has attracted over $100 million in contributions from industry around the world to build a public park for the global village. The Brain Opera has been linked into the world fair infrastructure with high-speed telecommunications links from Lincoln Center into the global Internet backbone, allowing people as far away a Japan to participate in this interactive music experience.
Brain Opera Technology Note by Joe Paradiso
There is such an enormous amount of innovative technology that has been developed for the Brain Opera that it is impossible to mention it all here. Consult the Brain Opera website for details. Brain Opera technology is a natural development the Hyperinstrument project, started at the MIT Media Lab in 1986 by Tod Machover and Joe Chung, and joined by Neil Gershenfeld in 1991 and myself in 1993. At first designed to enhance the virtuosity of some of the world's greatest performers, from Yo-Yo Ma to Prince, hyperinstruments started evolving in 1991 towards the development of expressive tools for non-professional musicians. The Brain Opera is the culmination to date of this work, and points the way to the further development of expressive objects (furniture, remote controls, clothing, etc.) and responsive environments (living rooms, concert halls, department stores, etc.).
Among the more significant new hardware developments for the Brain Opera are the Harmonic Driving system (participant is detected when a light beam is interrupted; steering is measured using capacitive sensing as well as a rotating potentiometer); the Melody Easel (a pressure-sensitive screen, based on ultrasound propagation through the screen surface); the Rhythm Tree (a microprocessor on each pad analyzes the signal from a piezoelectric strip, which picks up the strike and reflects the way the pad was hit, allowing dexterous and expressive control); the Gesture Wall (RF field sensing measures the body's electricity, turning motion into sound and image); the Digital Baton (5 pressure-sensitive resistors, 3 orthogonal accelerometers, and an infrared LED, detetct a combination of precise and expressive gestures); the Singing and Speaking Trees (which use a floormat switch to detect the user's presence, and a hand-held piezoresistive mouse for pointing); and the Sensor Carpet (which uses a matrix of 64 pressure-sensitive piezoelectric wires to measure the position and intensity of footsteps, and Doppler radars and ranging sonars to measure upper body motion). Among the project's numerous software innovations are the Singing Trees (analysis of every nuance and "feeling" of vocal quality); Harmonic Driving (parametric algorithms that allow a piece of music to be shaped and "personalized" while it is playing); the Rhythm Tree (which analyzes multiple-person behavior to create a complex systemic reaction); the Performance Hyperinstruments (which forge an array of continuous gesture and discrete positional information into intuitive, natural controls); and the entire Brain Opera system, which is itself a complex networked environment capable of integrating new elements into an existing structure automatically or in human-assisted fashion.
Brain Opera Space Design Note by Ray Kinoshita
To me, the Brain Opera posed a particular challenge to integrate electronic technology into a spatial, tactile, and artistic environment. Computers, as sophisticated and powerful as they are, are still trapped in a rather stodgy interface of wires, boxes, and screens. We are only beginning to create a physical freedom of interaction with the computer that will someday be completely natural. The first step towards this freedom (in the Mind Forest) was to create a magical forest of steel trees that shoves all the boxes overhead, and creates a field of tantalizing dangling objects that offer explorations and expressions of musical sound. The environment is a meshing of physical objects, light, image projection, and acoustics. Raw steel, silicone rubber, and coated meshes provide the appropriately material-yet-immaterial stuff of the Brain Opera forest. In the Performance Space, similar materials are used, and a large undulating backdrop for image projection is added immediately behind the grouped performers and their steel trees so that space of physical and visual interaction for the performers is intensified.
Brain Opera Visual Design Note by Sharon Daniel
Each visual interface in the Brain Opera has been designed to allow participants and performers to compose, control and interpret Brain Opera music using their bodies in direct, intuitive, physical manipulations such as gesture, touch, and voice. These interfaces use evocative and poetic images instead of diagramatic or scientific indices to reflect and guide the participant's interaction with each system. The dominant visual metaphors of the Brain Opera are the body and the word. The body is a complex, dynamic network of sense perception and thought processing organs -- the physical manifestation of the multiple, distributed systems that induce and interpret perception, emotion and intellection. The word is the Minskian "agent" of language, a unit of meaning continuously evolving through contextualization, recombination and redefinition. The body is analogous to musical form, the word to music's content. Photographically-based images - rather than the computer graphics generally used for such interactive image systems - help to engage audience members by evoking memories and dreams, mystery and poetry, as well as accompaniment to every musical interaction.
Brain Opera: Bios
Tod Machover (Composer/Creator/Project Director) has been widely recognized as one of the most important and innovative composers of his generation. His music breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries, offering a synthesis of acoustic and electronic sound, of symphony orchestras and interactive computers, of operatic arias and rock songs, and that delivers serious and powerful messages in an accessible and immediate way. After studying composition at the Juilliard School with Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions, Machover was Director of Musical Research at Pierre Boulez's IRCAM Institute in Paris (1978-85). He is Associate Professor of Music and Media at the MIT Media Lab, where he is also co-director of the new "Things That Think" consortium. Machover's music has been commissioned and performed by many of the world's most important musicians and ensembles, such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the London Sinfonietta, the Ensemble InterContemporain, the Ensemble Modern, and The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. His work has received numerous prizes and awards, and in 1995 he was named a "Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres," one of France's highest cultural honors. Machover's award-winning opera "VALIS" was commissioned by the Centre Pompidou in Paris to celebrate its tenth anniversary in 1987. He composed an unusual mini-opera, "Media/Medium," in 1994 for the magicians Penn and Teller, who toured it throughout the United States. In addition to his work as a composer, Machover is widely noted as a designer of new techology for music. He is the inventor of Hyperinstruments, a technology that uses smart computers to augment musical expression. Some of these hyperinstruments have been designed for such diverse virtuosi as Yo-Yo Ma and Prince, and the "Hyperstring Trilogy" is one of the culminating points of this development. Another direction that hyperinstrument work has taken since 1991 has been towards instruments, tools and environments for non-professional musicians in an attempt to bring creativity and expression to everyday life. The Brain Opera is the culminating point to date of this path. After the Brain Opera, Machover will be working on a new hyperstring work for the Kronos Quartet, and an opera about the CIA for the Houston Grand Opera.
Marvin Minsky (Text/Ideas) is Toshiba Professor at the MIT Media Lab. Often identified as one of the founders of the field of Artificial Intelligence, Professor Minsky has worked since the early 1950s on applying the powerful descriptive mechanisms offered by computation to characterizing human psychological processes and on endowing machines with the ability to act intelligently and adapt effectively. A co-founder of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (with John McCarthy in 1961) and a long tenure as its director and co-director (together with Seymour Papert from 1963 to 1971) placed his imprint upon the entire field of Artificial Intelligence. In the early 1970s, Minsky and Papert began formulating a theory called The Society of Mind which combined insights from developmental child psychology with their and their students' experiences of attempting to build intelligent machines. The Society of Mind proposes that intelligence is the product of the managed interaction of a diverse array of agents, rather than the product of any singular mechanism. Such diversity is necessary, they believed, because different tasks require fundamentally different mechanisms; the question to be answered then becomes not what mechanism the mind uses but how it manages the interaction of these diverse elements to yield coherent behavior. In 1985, Minsky published his seminal book, "The Society of Mind." This book's novel composition of 270 interconnected one-page ideas reflects the structure of the theory itself; each page either proposes an idea or mechanism accounting for some phenomena or addresses a problem introduced by some adequate but incomplete solution of another page. Since the publication of The Society of Mind, Minsky has continued to develop the theory in several directions. He is currently working on a new book, "The Emotion Machine," describing the role that emotions play in mental process viewed as a society of interacting agents. Since his childhood in New York, Minsky has also been deeply involved in music, first as a pianist, then as improvisor and theorist. The texts used in the Brain Opera are taken from discussions between Minsky and Machover on music and the mind, recorded at the MIT Media Lab between 1993 and 1996.
Sharon Daniel (Visual Design Director) is a video artist specializing in interactive video sculpture. Her previous collaboration with Tod Machover, VALIS SONG, a multi-channel
video and sound installation, was presented at The Kitchen in New York in April, 1993. Her video and interactive installation work has been presented throughout the United States in such diverse venues as the DeCordova Museum in Boston, the Chicago Film Festival, and SIGGRAPH 95 in Los Angeles. An interactive CD-ROM, "The Body of The Possible," will be completed in 1997. Her interactive video sculpture,"Strange Attraction: Non-logical Phase-lock over Space-like Intervals", was presented at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies in 1993 and published in Technology Review. Daniel holds a Bachelor of Music Degree from Baylor University, a Master of Music Degree in
opera production and direction from the University of Texas, and a Master of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. She has taught Video Art at the
Rhode Island School of Design and the in Visual Arts Program at MIT, and a was visiting artist at St. Martin's School of Art in London. In Fall 1996, she will become Assistant Professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Ray Kinoshita (Set and Instrument Design) is a Harvard-trained architect and the winner of several prestigious awards, including the Progressive Architecture Young Architects Award in 1993. RK Studio has designed elegant and innovative solutions for a broad range of artistically-minded clients, including Salamander Restaurant in Cambridge, Bennington College in Vermont, the Frederick Schultz Gallery in New York City, and homeowners. Most recently, she received a 1995 Federal Design Achievement Award for the Womens Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, New York. She lives, works, and teaches in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Maggie Orth (Production Design and Direction) is a visual artist and theatrical technician. She holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she majored in painting with a concentration in industrial designas well as an MS from the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, where she worked in video and performance. Besides project management, which includes coordinating software, computer systems, physical set, video, audio equipment and theatrical needs, she has also worked on the sculptural design of physical interfaces for the Brain Opera, most noticeably for the Rhythm Tree pads, harmonic Driving steering mechanism, and Digital Baton housing. She also runs afterschool program in computers and art for underprivleged children at the Community Arts Center in Cambridge. In September, she will become a PhD student in Tod Machover's group at the Media Lab.
Joseph Paradiso (Technology Design and Direction) joined the research staff of the MIT Media Lab in 1994 to explore novel applications of sensor technologies for opening new channels of computer-user interaction. During this period, he has designed many new interface devices based on electric field sensing, magnetics, acoustics, radar, and optics. These have included a wireless hyperviolin bow tracker, the body-sensing "Spirit Chair" for Penn & Teller), gesture-sensing frames (for a collaboration with Prince), as well as interactive piezoelectric balloons, musical radars, and scanning electric-field sensor
arrays. As Technology Director for the Media Lab's Things That Think consortium, he is responsible for identifying and pursuing new areas of technical development. Paradiso received a B.S. in electrical engineering and physics summa cum laude from Tufts University in 1977, and in 1981 completed a Ph.D. in physics from MIT. From 1992-1994, he directed the development of precision alignment sensors for the GEM muon detector at the Superconducting Supercollider. In addition to his physics career, Paradiso has been designing electronic music synthesizers and composing electronic music since 1975, and long been active in the avant-garde music scene as a producer of electronic music programs for non-commercial radio.
Craig Abler (Sensor Carpet Electronics) is an MIT senior majoring in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, with a specialty in hardware design.
Ben Adida (Web Design) is a sophomore at MIT majoring in Theoretical Computer Science. He has done professional web site design, including at the Hearst Corporation.
Anne AzÄma (Soprano) is a specialist in medieval and renaissance music, and has appeared worldwide as a soloist and as a member of the Boston Camerata. Her dÄbut solo CD, "The Unicorn," was awarded the Grand Prix du Disque in France. She originated the role of Sophia in Tod Machover's "VALIS," and recorded the part for the Bridge CD.
Maribeth Back (Sound Designer/Performer) is currently finishing her doctorate at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, where she is researching the integration of sonic elements into the design of multi-modal computational tools and environments. Before attending Harvard she was resident sound designer at the American Repertory
Theatre in Cambridge. Her work in sound over the past eighteen years has ranged from producer and announcer for a public radio station in Fairbanks, Alaska to radio
engineer for NBC Radio in New York to staff engineer for Big Apple Studios, a major recording studio in Manhattan.
Karol Bennett (Soprano) has been heard in lieder, oratorio, opera, and new-music concerts worldwide. She is an active recitalist, and has recently performed in the Far East, France, Italy, New York, Los Angeles, and Moscow, where she gave the first Russian performances of Debussy's "PellÄas et MÄlisande" and Bernstein's "'Kaddish' Symphony." She has frequently collaborated with Tod Machover, and is featured on the recording of his "Flora," as well as in "Song of Penance" of the Hyperstring Trilogy.
Tanya Bezreh (Company Manager/Design Assistant) graduated in English from Harvard in 1995, where she was active in founding the university's first puppet theater, The Onion Weavers. She also studied drawing, painting, computer-aided design, and animation. During her summers, Tanya travelled to Germany writing for the popular travel guide Let's Go: Europe 1994, and was editor of Let's Go: Germany 1995. Periodically, she flies out to Cincinatti to consult for the product invention firm Richard Saunders Intl.
Susan Bottari (Company Administrator) is an Administrative Assistant in the Opera of the Future and Physics and Media groups at the MIT Media Lab.
Meredith Broussard (Speaking Tree Technical Director) joined the Brain Opera this Spring team after retiring from AT&T Bell Labs. She graduated in computer science from Harvard University in 1995, and is a specialist in user interface design and programming.
Richard Ciliberto (Hardware Production) is an independent musician and consultant for Studio-Q-Electronics in Boston. He also produced the touring electronics for the Sensor Chair designed at the MIT Media Lab for Penn and Teller.
Ben Denckla (Software Director) is a Masters student in Tod Machover's group at the MIT Media Lab. He has a degree in music and computer science from Harvard, where he managed the Electronic Music Studio. Besides being an accomplished cellist, he has also worked as a researcher at the National Institutes of Heath (NIH). Denckla has been responsible for designing and helping to write the main software infrastructure for the Brain Opera, including the Rogus McBogus MIDI application framework, and has supervised all software development on the project.
Alexandra Ellwood (Software Design and Development) is a graduating senior in MIT's computer science department, and will continue next year as a research assistant in Tod Machover's group at the Media Lab.
Ed Hammond (Audio Director) is a sophomore at MIT, majoring in Media Arts and Sciences. He has a strong background in recording studio production and MIDI techniques, as well as in Macintosh systems programming. He helped design the audio infrastructure for the Brain Opera, as well as record the vocalists used in Brain Opera performances. His rock band is active in the Boston area.
Kai-yuh Hsiao (Software Design) is a freshman at MIT. He is a computer science major, as well as an award-winning pianist.
Lorraine Hunt (Mezzo-Soprano) is a specialist in opera and lieder, and has been featured worldwide with such organizations as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Tanglewood Festival, Glyndebourne Festival, and the OpÄra Bastille in Paris. She has been a close close collaborator of such conductors and directors as Kent Nagano, Jeffrey Tate, William Christie and Peter Sellars.
Andrew Garcia (Internet Broadcasting/Music) is a junior at MIT majoring in a joint degree of Music and Electrical Engineering/Computer Science.
Neil Gershenfeld (Technology Consultant) came to the MIT Media Lab in 1990 to work with Tod Machover and Yo-Yo Ma on the hypercello project. He then joined the Media Lab faculty to set up the Physics and Media group, to more broadly explore the boundary between the content of information and its physical representation. He is a co-Principal Investigator of the Media Lab's Things That Think research consortium.
Laura Gerson (Production Assistant) is a freshman at Colgate University, and is working on the Brain Opera as a summer intern.
Matt Gorbet (Harmonic Driving Game Design) is a graduating senior at MIT, where he majored in Media Arts and Sciences, with a concentration in visual arts, and he will enter the Media Lab as a Masters student in September. His specialty is computer graphics and graphics design, and he has extensive professional experience in those fields.
Jin Kang (Visual Assistant) received a B.S. in Film and Media Studies from MIT in 1996, and will begin graduate studies in film production at USC this fall.
Jacqueline Karaaslanian (Audience Liaison) has been a Senior Administrative Assistant at the Media Lab since it opened in 1985, and was in charge of daily operations for Seymour Papert's Learning and Epistemology Group. She has recently joined Tod Machover's group, and will work closely with Machover on the development and administration of complex projects like the Brain Opera.
June Kinoshita (Text Editing and Preparation) is a freelance science writer specializing in medical technology and neuroscience. A graduate of Harvard University, she has won numerous awards for her work, including fellowships from MIT's Knight Foundation and the Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institute. She is a former editor of Scientific American, and now is a contributing editor of Science magazine. She is currently writing a five part series on the brain and its development for public television.
Ara Knaian (Rhythm Tree Electronics Design) is an MIT sophmore in Electrical Engineering with an expertise in embedded computing, which he drew on to create the special electronic circuitry of the 330 pads of the Rhythm Tree.
Suzanne Lowell (Lighting Designer) serves on the faculty of the Boston Conservatory. Her
lighting designs have been seen at Boston Symphony Hall, The Zieterion Theatre, Chiswick Park Theatre, Boston Center for the Arts, The Lyric Stage, Emerson's Majestic Theatre and the Boston Conservatory. Her designs for fundraisers and special events have been seen at Boston's Four Seasons, Charles and Westin hotels, The Atrium at Chestnut Hill, Pine Brook Country Club and International Place.
Teresa Marrin (Digital Baton and Website Design/Performer) has just completed her Masters work in Tod Machover's group at the MIT Media Lab, and will be continuing as a PhD student in the Fall. She received an A.B. in music from Harvard-Radcliffe in 1992, where she founded a student orchestra and trained in orchestral conducting. After graduating from college, she lived in India on a Rockefeller Fellowship, studying the Hindustani raga system. At the Media Lab, her work has focused on the design of software tools for analyzing and teaching musical expression. She was the design director of the Digital Baton, and has contributed to many other musical and conceptual aspects of the Brain Opera as well.
Eric MÄtois (Interactive Internet Design) is a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab. He studied matematics and engineering in France before coming to MIT, where he is working to apply the newest ideas and techniques of signal processing and information theory to the study of musical sounds.
Christÿpheren Nomura (Baritone) has appeared in recital and concert throughout the world. Most recently he has given critically acclaimed recitals at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the 92nd Street Y in New York, as well as with the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society. He can be seen as Prince Yamadori in the movie version of Madame Butterfly, released recently by Sony.
Will Oliver (Singing Tree Audio Design) is a Masters student in computer science at MIT, and a research assistant in Tod Machover's group at the Media Lab. He studied engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and has lived and worked in Japan, and speaks Japanese fluently. He is also a performing rock musician.
Kat Park (Visual Design Assistant) is a graduating senior at MIT with a major in Computer Science and Engineering and minor in Architecture design.
Patrick Pelletier (Music Software Development and Design) is a junior at MIT, majoring in computer science. With Ben Denckla, he designed the main software system for the Brain Opera, and has also contributed to the design and development of most of its parts, including the Rhythm Tree, Gesture Wall, and Performance Space.
Rolf Rando (Harmonic Driving Graphics Software) is an MIT senior in computer science. In 1994 he invented a realtime artistic 3D realtime rendering system which is being used for the Harmonic Driving game. He is co-founder of ThinkFish Productions Inc., a San Francisco game company which he will be rejoining upon graduation.
Matt Reynolds (Electronics Development and Design) is a senior at MIT, majoring in engineering and computer science, with a strong background in RF, microwave and radar, and real-time computing.
Pete Rice (Software Development and Design) just graduated from MIT with a major in
Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Whether by playing guitar in a band or by designing interactive music systems, he has always kept his first passion, music, as a large part of his life. Before joining the Brain Opera team, he had designed software for several other projects with Tod Machover, including the spatial music experience in Vox-cubed and the Penn and Teller Sensor Chair. In the BrainOpera, he has primary responisbilities for the music software in the Performance Space as well as for Harmonic Driving and the Gesture Wall. In the Fall, he will continue as a Masters student in Tod Machover's group at the Media Lab.
Joel Rosenberg (Hardware Development) is a sophmore at MIT majoring in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and has been working in the Physics and Media group at the Media Lab, offering hardware support. He is also an active percussionist.
Noah Schottenfeld (Audio Assistant) is a sophomore at MIT, with a strong interest in media arts and sciences, neuroscience, computer science and electrical engineering.
David Small (Expressive Text Design and Animation) is a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab, and already holds two degrees from MIT. His work on information design has appeared in Scientific American, Print, Communication Arts, the Atlantic Monthly, ID magazine's 42nd Annual Design Review and the book "Information Architects."
Josh Smith (Cam-8 Visual Effects/PIC Programmer) is currently a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab in Neil Gershenfeld's Physics and Computation group. He has been included on
a patent for the electric field sensors featured in the Gesture Wall, and has developed a three dimensional mouse using the same sensors. His many interests include quantum and parallel computation, and he holds advanced degrees in both philosophy and physics.
Josh Strickon (Web Design/Webmaster) is a junior at MIT, pursuing a double degree in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science and Media Arts and Sciences. He has a background in programming as well as in piano performance.
Charles Tang (Internet Music) is a Masters student in Tod Machover's group at the MIT Media Lab. He is a computer programmer and also an accomplished pianist, and holds a Masters degree in performance from Juilliard.
Chris Verplaetse (Digital Baton Hardware) is currently a graduate student and research assistant at the MIT Media Lab in the Physics and Media Group. His research interests involve the design and creation of motion-cognitive and motion-responsive systems.
He also writes music for, and plays, guitar.
Michael Wiener (Production/Video Assistant) is a recent graduate of Harvard
University's Social Studies concentration, and sustains academic interests in social policy reform, focusing on community health care, as well as professional interest in multimedia production. He will enter Mount Sinai School of Medicine next year.
Yin Yin Wong (Expressive Text Design and Animation) is a graphics designer and interface expert. She graduated with a Masters degree in 1995 from the MIT Media Lab, where she specialized in animating text to enhance its expressive content. She is the co-founder of a new interactive design firm in San Francisco. Her work has been exhibited at SFMOMA and appeared in publications such as the Atlantic Monthly and Computer Human Interaction Conference Proceedings as well as the book "Information Architects."
John Yu (Singing Tree Software/Internet Music) has just completed a Masters degree in computer science at MIT, and wrote his thesis on the music generation engine used in the Singing Tree. He has a special interest in music improvisation, especially when done
by a computer.
The MIT Media Laboratory, directed by Nicholas Negroponte, is a place for advanced research into a broad range of new information technologies, including digital television, computer music, computer vision, electronic publishing, artificial intelligence and artificial life, human/machine interface design, and education-related technologies. The Laboratory's charter is to invent and creatively exploit new media for human well-being and individual satisfaction, without regard to present-day constraints. Housed in a specially designed I.M. Pei building, the Media Lab is a more than $23-million/year research and teaching organization, with 85 percent of its contract research funding provided by more than 100 corporate sponsors, the balance by various agencies of the
US government. This is a unique formula, as is the Lab's policy of letting all sponsors share all of the Lab's intellectual property, which encourages an open intellectual environment and the sharing of discoveries and the practical application of inventions.
