This Does Compute

‘Tis the Sunday before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse. Well, maybe one or two, since the house happens to be the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a place infested with mice--the computer variety, that is.

As Tod Machover walks me through this high holy ground of the wired set, a stray scientist can, indeed, be found to stir a mouse and create magic.

And often no mice are needed at all. Machover plays an electronic ditty on special thread sewn onto a jeans jacket. A Japanese scientist shows off beautiful handblown-glass bottles that, when the stoppers are removed, release music as if it were perfume. One is essence of violin; another, cello; a third, piano--and together they play a trio.

Machover heads the media lab’s freewheeling music department, called, for lack of anything better, Opera of the Future. And he is, in fact, a composer who has taken opera into the future (the science-fiction “VALIS,” in 1987, the first “computer opera”; the interactive, multimedia “Brain Opera,” in 1996) and back (the more traditional “Resurrection” at Houston Grand Opera last year).

With his MIT team, he has refashioned the violin, viola and cello into “hyper-instruments”--in which the sound is manipulated through a computer--and written a hyper-cello concerto for Yo-Yo Ma and a hyper-viola concerto for Kim Kashkashian (premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1991).

Machover is a Juilliard-trained composer and a cellist. He played chamber music in his youth and electric cello in a rock band, and much of his music includes a lively interplay between serious music and pop, as well as between innovative technology and immediate theatricality. Even his appearance betrays these concerns--Einsteinian frizzy hair and snazzy, colored socks. His office is a surprisingly low-tech refuge, crowded with books, reel-to-reel tapes, and framed photos of his two young daughters. A strawberry iMac and stereo are his only equipment. An old-fashioned dial clock on the windowsill doesn’t even work.

Question: How did you get so tied up with technology?

Answer: Well, my mom is a pianist who went to Juilliard and comes from a European intellectual tradition. My dad, who grew up in Iowa, is just the opposite: visual and populist. He is one of the first people in computer graphics, and he always had the conviction that you needed some human way of communicating with the computer. And I guess because of that I’ve always been interested in dead-serious things done in a direct way. I love music in the most immediate visceral way, but I also like to think about music and have always been comfortable with computers.

Q: After Juilliard you went to work at Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, the electronic music center founded by Pierre Boulez in Paris. What kind of influence did that have on you?

A: This was in 1978, the year after IRCAM had begun, and it was a time when a lot of the traditional categories of serious music were breaking down. At IRCAM, there was the basic conviction that computers could offer something major to music if the machines could allow performers and composers to use their musical intuitions. Of course, it’s taken a while to get that right.

Q: You remained at IRCAM for seven years, and you’ve been at the Media Lab since it was founded in 1985. Have you gotten that particular equation right? Does the music drive the machine, or is it the other way around?

A: The fact is I had always felt kind of schizophrenic about my performing side and composing side. At Juilliard, which uses the 19th century model of training composers, you’re expected to hear everything in your inner ear. It was five or six years of sitting at a table looking at scores. And I remember how liberating it was going to IRCAM and having these machines on which you could try something out, almost as if you were a sculptor in sound. I must admit I feel a little naked without technology, but I do think it is the music that counts most.

Q: What have you learned from all this immersion in technology, especially since lots of things don’t end up working?

A: One danger of technology is its tendency to expand and proliferate, to the point of there being too much information to take in. I think of it as being in a raft in white water. You have to stay in your boat with many, many other things going on, and sometimes you can enjoy and take things in, and sometimes it’s enough to hold on to what you have.

But I think that what technology does very well is expand the richness of music by giving a listener or performer a musical object that goes beyond physical limits, but not mental or conceptual limits. It is very good for big things and details. Electronics can shape sonorities into textures far vaster than anything you can blend with an orchestra. Now, that’s very good for defining moods and for making transitions and changes in large-scale architectures. And I also love technology for its ability to explore what happens in a note or between notes, by slowing down harmonies and breaking sounds apart, which adds an extra expressive dimension.

But traditional instruments and traditional ways of thinking about music in notes, rhythms and phrases still are needed to give the human dimension. In fact, I no longer find myself enamored with amplified sound or with things that sound electronic. I find that loudspeakers tend to flatten sound or simplify it. One of my dreams right now, and one of the dreams in this building, is that if technology is good enough, the world can become magical without wires.

Technology itself is not that interesting, but what it does to help us pay attention to the beauty of the real physical world, that’s really magical.

Q: How can it do that without still being technology?

A: In the last five or six years, we have started a new research direction here called Things That Think, and a lot of the initial ideas came from musical thinking. It involves everything from basic computing to how you sense things and how you send information around. There is a general feeling that the digital world is fine if it can expand your ability to do certain things, such as communicate, but electronic things, by themselves, aren’t necessarily great.

Ultimately, purely electronic media are a transition point, and I suspect that electronics will probably end up enhancing, rather than replacing, all the physical things around us. I think they’ll grow into the physical things in a much more complex way.

Q: And so is one next step for technology to be part of the environment?

A: Oddly enough, there are suddenly places popping up based on just that idea of giving people hands-on experience of music in various ways. Sony is building a “music box” in Berlin that’s going to be part of their big Europe center. Paul Allen is building his Experience Music project in Seattle, and it is being designed by Frank Gehry. Last year, I was involved in a project in Essen, Germany, called Meteorite, an underground building where a group of architects and visual artists and sound artists got to do something serious with a Disney-sized budget. It’s a permanent underground cave with ramps and big geometric rooms, each one containing a different kind of visual and musical experience. I created music that fills up the whole place and is designed as one big piece that changes depending upon where you are. Next year, there will be the House of Music in Vienna, which will not only contain the Vienna Philharmonic archives and have a floor devoted to the history of music in Vienna, but will become the permanent residence for the “Brain Opera.”

Q: Speaking of new musical experiences, what do you have in mind for the “Toy Symphony” that you are working on?

A: There is a vacuum in offering truly creative experiences in music to children. So we are making a whole set of what we call music toys for children. Some will be Shapers, extremely physical objects that kids can hold in their hands and touch or tap or pull or squeeze--activities that will change or personalize little bits of music.

The most recent examples are balls made out of fabric and a thread 1/8like that on the jeans jacket 3/8 that actually respond to electricity in your body; the patterns of its embroidery will determine the way it sounds.

There will be another category of toys called Simple Things, say little eggs with a couple of buttons and a little squeezer on the bottom side and a microphone and little computer and little speaker in them. These will communicate with each other, and if you have others to play with, you can be part of a large texture or trade sounds with somebody else.

Then we’re doing something called A Big Thing, which is kind of like Dr. Seuss meets a Lego construction kit. It will be a large sculpture, 7 feet tall, with foam parts that can be squeezed. Each aspect of it represents some element of music, be it fragments and phrases or operations upon them. The idea is to connect these and fill up a whole stage with them. My “Toy Symphony” will be for about 100 of these onstage, played by children and a full orchestra.

Q: And at the other extreme, what about your work in opera of the future?

A: You know, I’m interested in a variety of different things, and I believe that somewhere they’re meant to fit together. I actually have two very different opera projects in the works. One is for the juggler Michael Moschen, which will be without a story and based entirely on sound and image and motion.

Q: Does this follow in the tradition of the magic show opera you did for Penn & Teller, which they included in their Las Vegas act?

A: Not really, in that this is a larger project for the opera company in Monte Carlo. But, in fact, I think that the next step in theater is to find some way of expanding it with new technology without killing it. And even though it’s very kitschy, some of the most interesting experiments on developing the scale of spectacle can be found in Las Vegas. I think the Michael Moschen project will be a way to start with that.

The other, “Twelve Looney Tones: Schoenberg in Hollywood,” will be concerned with how 1/8composer Arnold 3/8 Schoenberg’s career presents so many of the paradoxes about about art and society in our times. Here is somebody for whom music was such a serious matter that he believed he could change the world with it, and yet, almost comically, he wound up living in Hollywood.

You know there was the famous meeting he had with 1/8producer Irving 3/8 Thalberg, who suggested Schoenberg compose the music for 1/8the movie of 3/8 “The Good Earth.” So you have this incredible contrast, the most uncompromising composer in the 20th century--a person audiences still resist, even though so much of Schoenberg is in the culture through film music--seriously considering this film music job.

And this central issue is still with us even now at the end of the 20th century. If we are all so smart and sophisticated, why is it so hard to do things which are demanding and serious yet also touch and reach people?

CROSSROADS

This is the first of a series of interviews, conducted by Calendar critics, with leaders in the arts and entertainment. It continues in daily Calendar through Friday.

Today

* MUSIC: Tod Machover, MIT media lab and new music composer

Monday

* TELEVISION: Jeff Cohen, founder of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

* MOVIES: John Lassiter, creative guru at Pixar Animation Studios

Tuesday

* THEATER: Cherry Jones, Tony-winning actress

* FOOD: Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley

Wednesday

* POP MUSIC: Tom Morello, Rage Against the Machine guitarist

* DANCE: Judy Mitoma, director, Center for Intercultural Performance, UCLA

Thursday

* JAZZ: Michael Dorf, CEO of the Knitting Factory

Friday

* ART: Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer Museum

* ARCHITECTURE: Rem Koolhaas, contemporary Dutch architect