Accelerating Music Technology

An Increasingly Popular Program Is Drawing Students Eager to Build — and Use — the Next Generation of Tools for Making Music

The room fills with electronic beeps and chirps, rising and falling notes generated by computer. Students are poring over their glowing laptops, trying to match frequency with pitch.

In this, as in other introductory music technology classes at MIT, the sound that fills the room is lively, if not exactly melodic. Like beginning violinists or pianists, novices to music tech need to “learn the nuances of their instruments,” says Ian Hattwick, an artist, researcher, and technology developer who teaches 21M.080 (Introduction to Music Technology). These initial electronic notes are their first steps.

A burgeoning area of study at the Institute, the field of music technology covers a range of activities, from analyzing musical data to computer-assisted composition, to building new kinds of instruments and creating new sounds. Some say the field is about being able to create any sound you can imagine — which sounds impressive enough. But as Hattwick points out, that’s not nearly a wide-enough scope to characterize this new musical zone.

“What we an imagine is only the beginning,” Hattwick says. Digital composition means “we can make sounds you can’t imagine. We can discover new sounds and new forms of music-making.”

PIONEERS

MIT’s long history of work in music technology dates back to the 1960’s and Professor Barry Vercoe’s Experimental Music Studio, which developed and improved technologies such as realtime digital synthesis, live keyboard input, and graphical score editing. Today, faculty members like Michael Cuthbert, who developed the music21 toolkit for musicology research, and Tod Machover, who directs the Opera of the Future group, continue to push the envelope of music technology research and applications.