TOD MACHOVER is the Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media at the MIT Media Lab, where he is also director of the Opera of the Future group. Before coming to MIT, he was the first Director of Musical Research at Pierre Boulez’s Ircam in Paris, and has degrees from The Juilliard School where he studied composition with Elliott Carter.
Machover has been described as “America’s most wired composer” by the LA Times and “a musical visionary” by The New York Times, and is widely recognized as one of the world’s most significant and innovative composers. He is also celebrated for inventing new technology for music, such as Hyperinstruments to augment virtuosic expression for musicians from Yo-Yo Ma to Prince, as well as the technologies behind Guitar Hero and Rock Band which grew out of his Lab. He is known for his visionary operas—such as the audience-interactive Brain Opera based on the work of Marvin Minsky, and the “robotic” Pulitzer Prize-finalist Death and the Powers—as well as for groundbreaking projects such as his City Symphonies that have created sonic portraits of cities around the world in massive collaboration with the people who live there. He created a special version of the City Symphonies combining aspects of Toronto, Edinburgh, Perth, Lucerne and Detroit— A Symphony for our Times—for the Closing Performance of the 2015 World Economic Forum in Davos.
Machover’s many honors include the first Ray Kurzweil Prize in Music and Technology, the first Arts Advocacy Award from the Kennedy Center, a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres from the French Government, and being named 2016 Composer of the Year by Musical America.