Inaugural Music Know-how Analysis Showcase celebrates work of latest graduate program’s preliminary college students | MIT Information

The MIT Music Know-how and Computation (MTC) Graduate Program — launched in fall 2024 as a collaboration between the Music and Theater Arts Part within the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), and the College of Engineering (SoE) — offered its inaugural MIT Music Know-how Analysis Showcase on Might 13. The occasion performed to a standing room-only home within the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Constructing’s Thomas Tull Live performance Corridor and featured various and fascinating analysis displays and music performances.

The celebratory event featured MTC’s first 5 enrollees (all of whom had been beforehand MIT undergraduates), alongside a number of PhD college students and college. Every scholar offered inspiring exemplars of suave engineering that mirrored the broader and burgeoning music expertise scene at MIT. 

The 90-minute occasion exhibited a broad array of analysis initiatives, together with a real-time visualization of what an AI co-improvising agent is about to play on a piano; a sound-art set up primarily based on noisy community communication; a hip-hop dance circle the place music is generated from dancing; and the usage of electroencephalogram (EEG) alerts to determine the musical tunes that our brains are imagining.

“A brand new house for exploration and insights” 

An interaction of technical presentation with dwell efficiency, the showcase started with remarks from SHASS Dean and professor of philosophy Agustín Rayo, SOE Dean and professor of chemical engineering Paula Hammond, and MTC Director and professor of the observe of music Eran Egozy.

Rayo started, “The objective of this program is easy — for MIT to guide the world in music expertise principle and utility,” including “it’s not nearly making music with expertise; it’s additionally about working throughout disciplines to assist higher form the way forward for expression in an AI-driven world, all whereas reflecting MIT at its finest.” 

Rayo famous the graduate program was made potential partly by the opening of the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Constructing in 2025, which supplied new lecture rooms, studios, rehearsal areas, and a devoted music expertise lab. He additionally credited the MIT Schwarzman Faculty of Computing for its assist for the graduate program. 

Hammond adopted: “As these on this room already know, music and engineering share some widespread roots. Each depend on mathematical precision and are knowledgeable by outlined buildings, rhythms, and frequencies. Each demand laborious work and technical know-how, paired with inspiration and creativeness, to create one thing completely new. Given these congruities, it’s no shock that so many school, college students, and employees members throughout MIT are additionally completed musicians and artists.”  

She continued, “Our music program is a gem. Solely at MIT might we carry the highest technologists and the highest musicians collectively to create distinctive alternatives for collaboration. Right here we’ve introduced collectively school and college students who determine strongly with each music and engineering to type a brand new house for exploration and insights. It’s a robust instance of the collaborative tradition that defines the Institute.”  

Egozy known as the occasion a “harmonious hybrid of live performance and symposium,” and recollected, “it’s a bit of mind-boggling to see what our college students have achieved in only one quick and fast-paced 12 months. Whereas we initially debated the trade-offs between a one-year and a two-year grasp’s program, I feel this cohort actually confirmed us that we are able to make big strides in studying and analysis skills in a concentrated time period.” 

Scholar analysis on show

A kind of college students is Claire Southard ’25, SM ’26, who developed a machine-learning mannequin used to determine musical notes hidden in EEG alerts.  

Southard explains, “yearly, musicians are recognized with motion problems corresponding to Parkinson’s illness and dystonia, or expertise accidents that forestall them from controlling their fingers and our bodies within the methods required to play their devices. Due to this, too many musicians are compelled to cease doing what they love. My work explores one technique to assist such musicians carry out once more by translating the music they’re attempting to play instantly from their mind exercise — bypassing the necessity for motor management altogether. To do that, I educated machine-learning fashions to foretell the music an individual is imagining from their mind exercise measured utilizing EEG, and most of the predicted items had been discovered to be recognizable representations of what the person imagined. By designing a system that permits musicians to create music no matter their bodily skills, I hope this work helps carry a extra accessible future for music efficiency nearer to actuality.”  

Earlier than becoming a member of MTC, Southard was initially unaware of the breadth, scope, and magnitude of what this system might provide for additional pursuing and realizing her pursuits. “The MIT Music Know-how and Computation Graduate Program taught me a lot concerning the prospects on the intersection of STEM and the humanities,” she says. “After I first began this system, I actually wasn’t certain what counted as ‘music expertise.’ By means of courses, analysis, and conversations with school, visitor audio system, and friends, I discovered the sector was far broader and extra fascinating than I might have beforehand imagined.”  

She continues, “coming from a background in neuro- and pc science, a lot of my undergraduate initiatives occurred completely on gadgets. However this program allowed me to come across extra hands-on experiences, from conducting audio recordings to constructing digital musical devices from scratch.” 

One other MTC graduate, and scholar speaker on the 2026 SHASS Superior Diploma Ceremony, Mariano Salcedo ’25, SM ’26, offered a customized internet utility permitting anybody to create distinctive emergent visuals which are pushed by real-time streaming music. To perform this impact, Salcedo constructed algorithms that leverage the advanced visible conduct of self-organized programs because the means towards an aesthetically synergetic finish.  

In his Superior Diploma Ceremony oration, Salcedo expressed his gratitude and admiration for the passionate those who he’s met not solely in MTC, however at MIT general. In an appropriately compassionate mode, he empathetically opined, “I feel what occasions like this name from us is to prepared the ground in human and humane-centered expertise, which suggests we don’t solely simply ask what we are able to construct, however we additionally ask who’s it going to have an effect on, who shouldn’t be going to have an effect on? Who does it profit?”  

Music expertise thriving at MIT

Affiliate Professor Anna Huang SM ’08 of MTA and the Division of Electrical Engineering and Laptop Science (EECS, by way of SCC), a graduate of the MIT Media Lab, and one of many world’s main researchers in collaborative human-AI music-making, echoed each Southard and Salcedo’s sentiments by way of her keynote presentation, “In Search of Resonance in Human-AI Interplay.” A compelling and intimately conversational tackle, her speech emphasised the significance of centering the human musician in all that’s accomplished regarding AI, whereas additionally making efforts to incorporate all musics of the world in its discourse at each alternative. 

With a lot of her members of the family within the viewers, Huang mirrored, “I’ve the privilege of being in each MIT Music and EECS — an interdisciplinary, shared house. What does it imply to construct music expertise on this context? We’re surrounded by extraordinarily proficient musicians, so we take this co-design method: We work with these musicians, we go into the studio, and each week we strive one thing. And the expertise grows with the inventive course of. We’re all the time attempting to push each of those ahead, and it’s all the time on the sting. It’s very, very rewarding. It’s the place I really feel most at dwelling.”   

Huang additionally defined how this observe units the stage for a brand new Research in Music Know-how topic that she will probably be co-teaching within the fall with not too long ago appointed Professor of Theater Arts Grisha Coleman. Class 21M.369/569 (Tuning Consideration: Inventive Practices in Motion, Sound, and AI) proposes that the examine of sound and motion practices can inform how we construct and envision computational programs, focusing notably on our relationship to AIs. It would introduce college students to a variety of musical practices in improvisation and somatics by means of motion-capture applied sciences, vital interplay design, generative modeling, and algorithms for interpretability and studying by way of human suggestions. 

All thought-about, the way forward for the MIT Music Know-how and Computation Graduate Program is vivid. Egozy says MTC admitted 10 grasp’s college students for the 2026-27 tutorial 12 months from over 100 candidates. Not like this 12 months’s class, subsequent 12 months’s college students won’t solely embody current MIT undergraduate alumni, but in addition new faces to campus. 

“Widening the pool to graduates of different colleges and establishments will carry a rare wealth of views and experiences to this system. Moreover, all three shared school between MTA and EECS — together with Mark Rau, Paris Smaragdis SM ’97, PhD ’01, and Huang — are inviting new Music Know-how PhD college students to their labs by means of EECS,” Egozy says. 

Embodying its mission, MTC is proving to be a vibrant, multidisciplinary program that pulls many sorts of scholars with quite a lot of profession goals from wide-ranging backgrounds. 

“Regardless of their range, our college students all possess a central commonality,” Egozy says, “not only a shared love for music, but in addition a deep want to enhance that zeal by means of expertise in a really warmhearted, humanitarian manner.” 

Checklist of initiatives

Rachel Loh, Quanta Fellow in Music Know-how and Computation: “Visualizing the Inner State of Music Fashions for Reside Human-AI Improvisation” 

Noble Harasha, Quanta Fellow in Music Know-how and Computation: “Modeling Subjectivity and Collective Sensory Notion as Noisy, Analog Communication in Suggestions-Pushed Networks” 

Z Chen, Quanta Fellow in Music Know-how and Computation: “Generative Music as a Catalyst for Social Choreography” 

Nithya Shikarpur: “The Transferring Drone: A Reside Improvisation within the Context of Hindustani Music with the Human Voice, Generative fashions, and Loops”

Mariano Salcedo, Alex Rigopulos (1992) Fellow in Music Know-how and Computation: “Neural Mobile Automata for Interactive Music Visualization”

Claire Southard, John Piscitello Fellow in Music Know-how and Computation: “Neural Decoding of Imagined Music”

Stephen Brade, Suwan Kim, Valerie Chen: “Whale, Cello (there?): A Musical Dialog between Cello and a Actual-time Diffusion Mannequin Educated on Whale Songs”