 Music's my area, music and technology. And the Media Lab's been a fantastic place to work on music because it's not a music school, it's not an art school. It's a place where we can think about how far and in which directions we can push music in the future. So I've been particularly interested in seeing every possible way that we can use music to allow everybody to create, to connect people and to invent new kinds of collaboration. And I just want to give you a few glimpses of those areas today because we've been pushing this work in a lot of directions for a while now. I got into this field kind of naturally but my dad was one of the first people in the field of computer graphics. So he had a company that made some of the first graphics machines and I grew up seeing those be built and invented. And my mom also went to Juilliard. She's a pianist but she's a really great and pretty well-known piano teacher, very, very creative piano teacher. So after our piano lessons, she used to have all the kids, we were three, four years old, spent about five minutes going around the house. She'd asked each of us to find an object that made an interesting sound. We'd all come back together. She'd say, okay, what sound does that make? And that one, okay, great. What's the loudest sound you can make with that? Oh, great. What's the softest sound? What does it sound like if you play those two together? Oh, great, okay. And now we've heard all the sounds. Make some words. What are some adjectives that describe those sounds? And we'd make some words and then she'd say, okay, have these sounds. We have some words. Let's tell a story. What comes first? What do you want to say? So after 10 or 15 minutes, we'd have all these new instruments and we'd have made sounds and we'd make a story. And then she'd say, okay, when you go home this week, I want you to just make a picture of what we just did. So when you come back next week, we can try it again. So in that little bit of time, we'd realize that music isn't just something made by a bunch of dead guys on manuscript paper that lived a long time ago. Music's something that's live in our world. It's something that comes from the world around us. We can make our own systems of music. And even notation that hard writing down of music is just a way to remember what we did so that you can do it again. So that was very inspiring for me and I think for a bunch of other people too. I studied piano for a little with her, but then I studied the cello. That was my instrument. And played kind of normal cello, the repertoire for a little while. And then by the time I was in my teens, I was playing rock music on my cello and was inventing electronics to plug it into. And was making it sound really pretty odd, which I still do from time to time. Right about the time this picture was taken, a couple of years ago when I was probably 23, I was still at Juilliard and I got invited to come to India. And I had never been here before and I was quite lucky. I got invited by a pretty prominent family who live in Ahmedabad who have a large bit of land and have a Le Corbusier house, very splendid. They let me stay with them for two months and then I traveled for two months with my cello. And I had the opportunity during that time to learn a great deal about Indian culture in general, but especially about Indian music. And I met all kinds of musicians, not in the south, but all over the north. And I took my cello around and would play for people and then they would play back. And I knew that the world of music was much bigger than I imagined and it was in full color. And so being here and listening to this country was one of the most transformative experiences I ever had. I've tried to do that since. Taking all those things, my love of performance, my love of classical music, rock music, music from around the world and technology, I started out by building instruments that would allow a performer to use his or her normal skills but to do much more than an instrument normally could do. So we invented this field called hyper instruments. That's Yo-Yo Ma playing one of our early hyper instruments. The idea is the instrument knows not just what notes are being played but how everything's being played, what the nuance is, what the expression is. So by changing your interpretation, the cello can turn into a flute or a violin or an electronic sound or a full orchestra and all under the control of the player. So this is a fairly recent example of a young English cellist playing a new version of hyper cello. It's just a normal cello with a special bow with all kinds of electronics embedded. But you'll hear that everything he's playing and all the lights he's controlling come from his normal performance on that instrument. So we do... Oh, thank you. So we build these kind of interactive systems that are quite smart and responsive in all kinds of contexts. And I do have robots around our lab and one of the most recent examples of these hyper instruments is for an opera that I wrote called Death and the Powers. And that's actually what we call a robot opera. It's about a guy who's rich, successful, powerful. He is actually, he wants to live forever and he's also kind of tired of the world. So he figures out a way of using all his smarts and all his money to allow himself to download himself into his environment and then to leave. So when the opera starts, he is about to turn on this system and he leaves the stage and for the rest of the opera, until the very, very end, the singer is down with the orchestra. You never see him again, but we wire everything about him. In fact, we invented this technology called disembodied performance, like a hyper instrument, but we also measure things that the performer isn't aware of like muscle tension and facial expression and breathing, things that are natural. And all of that information gives the whole opera stage a sense of how this performer is feeling. So everything you see, the set, the furniture, the objects, the sound, where it is, how it changes, all represents the inner spirit of this performer and the idea is that once he's gone, this environment is him and everybody else's family and his business associates and people who run the world have to decide if that's true and if they like that. So here's just a little tiny bit of Death and the Powers to give you a sense of how that works. The robots get the last word in this opera. If you want to see it, it's touring around, it's going to Dallas next, this beautiful new Dallas opera house in February. And another thing that interests us is how to take a great live experience. We're doing a live interactive simulcast in HD image and multiple channels around sound to a variety of cities around the world, but we're doing it with all kinds of layers of content like viewing from backstage, viewing what the robots see, viewing what it's like from inside the system, things that you don't see in the live house that gets beamed into the places remotely where people are watching and it also gets beamed to your mobile device. So you bring your mobile device to the theater. We're actually testing this just a couple of days ago at the Media Lab and content that you don't see in the live hall that gives you extra dimension to the story, that gives you extra images, comes up on your device and gives a whole extra dimension to the show. You can even send information back to the live opera house. There's a gigantic computer-controlled chandelier in Dallas. The next thing that interests me is not just building these crazy stage shows for some of the world's greatest performers, but finding a way to use similar concepts and technologies to make it possible for anybody who loves music, which is pretty much everybody, to be involved, to directly and actively participate in music in all kinds of ways. So we've done all kinds of things like make a whole orchestra of instruments that use video games and body gesture and voice and touch to control and make your own music. We made a censor chair that people like Bono from U2 plays, instruments that are squeezy toys for children so that they can play with professional musicians. You may have heard of these two things. They both came out of my lab based on all the things we built for that interactive orchestra. Thank you. We do a lot of work with music and health, both to use music to just promote general well-being but also to diagnose a variety of diseases and to give a voice, literally a voice to people who can't communicate in any other way. This is somebody named Dan Elsie, who was born with cerebral palsy. He came to one of our workshops. It turned out he was a very fine musician. We made a head tracking device that allowed him to use some of our software to compose his own music. Then we made a more sophisticated model of the device that allows him to perform his own music. So I thought I'd just show you this little clip of Dan playing his own piece, My Eagle Song. One thing with Dan that happened that we didn't expect is he's pretty popular as a musician now. So one thing that we do from time to time is go out and we're kind of his roadies for his shows. He'll go and perform in my students and I'll go and cheer him on and help him do that and try to put them together. How can we make a new kind of collaboration so that people who have a lot of musical background and a lot of experience can work as equals with people who just love music, the general public, students, anybody, and really make things together. Not a teaching model, not a mentorship model, but really let's build something together. I started this idea kind of in a big way. The Toronto Symphony Orchestra came to me about a year and a half ago and asked me if I wanted to write a symphony for them and I said, I'll write you a symphony, but only if I can invite everybody in the city of Toronto to compose it with me. And Toronto, they're great people up there. They're very nice. Unfortunately, they said yes. We did this big project in Toronto, figured out a model to collaborate with many, many people and have since done another one for the Edinburgh International Festival, which premiered about a month and a half ago. And the basic way that we do this is to start out with a picture, something that has no sound at all, to give an impression of what this particular piece and this particular city might be like. It's, you know, I usually go and take a look and just put it out there. So for Toronto, for instance, this is something that expresses that it might start soft and end soft and build up and there might be synchronized parts and fluid parts. And I also, at the very beginning, make a little story out of it, different ways of exploring the city. And I also say there are different ways that we're going to share information. Yours are things I'll ask from the community. You know, send me recordings that you make in the city. Send me stories. Send me pictures. If you're a musician, send me sounds. Mine are things that I make and send out, little bits of the piece, melodies, chords, harmonies, whatever they are. And ours within H are sessions that we do either in person or via Skype or whatever to take material from the piece and shape it into something that will actually end up in the final composition. By doing this in Toronto, for instance, I met people from all over the city, all different backgrounds, all different communities to listen and to make things. I got recordings about 15,000 recordings, pretty high quality ones, from places in the city, from people's houses, from conversations. A lot of people send mass transit systems where they sound kind of interesting. They're pretty different in each city, too. We worked with the school board in every city and Toronto, we worked with thousands and thousands of kids, grades three to six. So about age eight to 11 or 12. They were all given the task of writing short pieces with some theme of Toronto. So we brought kids together who had never met before to listen to each other's pieces. And they all used some software that we created called Hyperscore, which uses lines in color so people can make sophisticated pieces without having to know music theory. And this is just a little snippet of how I took hundreds of these pieces, put a little bit of my spice in them and wrote this for orchestra. It's about 30 seconds of some bits of Hyperscore. The next thing that we've done for these projects is to make a whole series of apps and there are a bunch of them online now. We keep adding to them that allow people to take music for the project as it develops and to make their own versions of things to post those again online so people can edit, comment, add to. This is called something called Constellation where I can take thousands of sounds recorded in a place, feed it into the software. The software breaks it up into little fragments, analyzes all the fragments according to their acoustical properties and you can sort them various ways. But then it sprays them on the screen like a Constellation and by moving my mouse and connecting them with a line I make my own composition based on these songs. So the line is my composition. I post that online and I can listen to different people's version of moving through a particular city. Media score, this allows me to take something like a melody, the fuzzy thing at the top. I can put a melody from the piece and you can take a series of virtual paint brushes and change the texture of the melody which then changes how it's orchestrated, how it feels and you can make your own version of different sections of the piece. Cauldron in Edinburgh, I made a kind of soup where if you stir the soup you change the overall sound of Edinburgh and if you pick the little spices, the little dots on the left you put ingredients into the soup and change the way they mix into the overall cities. That sounds like a tiny fragment. A little bit, actually a fun one to play with. We even did something where you can take fragments or bubbles that represent fragments of all the music in history and we did a live event with the Guardian newspaper where you could come online, listen to all these fragments. I had a young pianist at the Media Lab looking at the circles in which people preferred and Bach was getting bigger and Ornette Coleman was getting smaller and he made up the music depending on where the circles were and that result became something that we used for the final composition as well. Took all of that, wrote it into a piece, rehearsed with orchestras back and forth. This is just a little bit of working with people in Edinburgh on a kind of crazy bagpipe that's played by a whole orchestra, an imaginary bagpipe. So we've had really fantastic results with this project. It's been amazing to go into different cities, explore them, meet people, listen to the city with people, think about what the city feels like, maybe think about what the community wants to imagine together about their city now and in the future through music. I wanted to just throw out an idea. India is such a special place. I wanted to just suggest the idea that instead of doing a city, maybe we could think about doing a piece together about the whole country. So this is an invitation to you not just to start sending things, but since doing something for a country and especially this country that what I'd like to do is invite you to think about it, see if it's something that might be of interest. You can let me know if you think it's a good idea, if you might be interested in working on it, but I'd love to know if you would like to help. And I just wanted to end with one teeny little thing from Toronto. This is just the 30 seconds from the end of the piece that gives you an idea of what happens when you pull a whole city together in music. Thank you very much. Thank you.