Mezzo-soprano Patricia Risley in a scene from Tod Machover’s opera Death and the Powers, which utilized experimental technology developed at the M.I.T. Media Lab. Photo by Jill Steinberg.
In the Summer 2023 issue of Chamber Music Magazine, Rebecca Schmid writes, “The composer Tod Machover speaks with the energy of someone half his 69 years as he reflects on the evolution of digital technology toward the current boom in artificial intelligence…. ‘What’s going on in A.I. is like a major, major difference, conceptually, in how we think about music and who can make it.’ Perhaps no other figure is better poised than Machover to analyze A.I.’s practical and ethical challenges…. He has been probing the interface of classical music and computer programming since the 1970s. As the first Director of Musical Research at the … Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (I.R.C.A.M.) in Paris, he [explored] the possibilities of what became the first digital synthesizer … A.I. is another tool in his palette. Yet Machover emphasizes the need to blend the capabilities of the technology with the human hand…. Machover: ‘I’ve invested a lot of time in trying to make it possible for people to interact meaningfully and creatively with music. Now our machines are producing all this amazing stuff, and they don’t have any music training…. The only reason music matters is because it’s a way of a human being reaching out to somebody else … It has meaning because it’s related to my life, or to yours.’ ”
