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Music technology occupies the center stage of MIT in the “future stage”, an evening in the string band and electronics for the graduate program of MIT Music Technology and Computing, as part of the 2025 International Computer Music Conference (ICMC).
The highly-watched event was held last month at the Thomas Taal Hall in the new Edward and Joyce Lind Music Building. The “Future Stage”, produced in collaboration with MIT Media Lab’s Future Group and Boston Self-directed Chamber Orchestra, is the first event proposed by the MIT Music Technology and Computing Graduate Program in MIT Music’s New Space.
Products for the “Future Stage” include two new works by MIT composers: Professor Evan Ziporyn, distinguished professor of MIT Music and Professor Eran Egozy: the world premiere of “EV6”; and Professor Muriel R. Cooper, Professor Tod Machover of Music and Media at the MIT Media Lab, and the US premiere of “Flow Symphony”. The jury selected three other works from the public appeals: “The wind will take us away”, Ali Balighi; Celeste Betancur Gutiérrez and Luna Valentin’s “Blank Pages”; Peter Lane and “Coastal Portraits: Periods and Thresholds.” Each piece was performed by a string orchestra nominated by Boston’s own Doglamy, a far cry.
“ICMC is all about introducing the latest research, works and performances of electronic music,” said Egozy, director of the graduate program of new music technology and computing at MIT. When it became part of the meeting with part of this year, “this seems like a great opportunity to demonstrate MIT’s commitment to music technology, especially the exciting new areas currently under development: the new Masters Program in Music Technology and Computing, the new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building with enhanced music technology facilities, and the new faculty (MT) (MT) (MT) (MT) (MT) (MT) (MT) (MT) (MT) (MT) (EEC) between MIT Music and Theatre Arts (MIT Arta and Mits Arta). These recently hired professors include the conference’s keynote speaker Anna Huang, who is also the creator of the machine learning model Coconet, powering Google’s first AI Doodle Bach Doodle.
Egozy emphasizes the uniqueness of this occasion: “You have to understand that this is a very special situation. Having a mature 18-member string band (out of reach) performs new works including electronic devices. In most cases, the performance of ICMC is in electronic music and in computer music and possibly music, especially in a smaller music world where we can blend two music.
To take advantage of this exciting opportunity, a public call was issued internationally to choose other works that will accompany Ziporyn and Egozy’s “EV6” and Machover’s “Flow Symphony”. A group of judges, including Egozy, Machover and other outstanding composers and technicians, selected three pieces from 46 entries in total, becoming part of the evening’s show.
“We received all kinds of works on this call,” Egozy said. “We saw a variety of musical styles and the way electronic devices would be used. No two works are very similar to each other, and I think our audiences will have a diverse and interesting feeling about music in this format. Crying is indeed a unified existence. They are full of passion and kind ways. They have more numerous music to attract a lot of music to the music. It has something to do with music.”
Egozy continued: “We took advantage of the technology built in Thomas Tull Coundall, which has 24 built-in speakers that surround the sound, allowing us to broadcast unique, amplified sounds to every seat in the house. Everyone’s voice may be slightly different, but there is always some sound and musical feeling.
Five works of the night used a series of technical components, including playing synthetic, pre-recorded or electronically manipulated sounds; connecting a microphone to an instrument used for real-time signal processing algorithms; broadcasting customized musical symbols to musicians; processing live sounds with generated AI and playing it in fun and unpredictable ways; and participating audiences, who use their phones as instruments to become part of the ensemble.
Ziporyn and Egozy’s work “EV6” This is the special advantage of the last innovation: “Evan and I had previously collaborated on a system called Tutti, which means “together” in Italian. Tutti allows audiences to use their smartphones as instruments so that we can all play together.” Egozy developed the technology, which was originally used for a better world at the MIT event in 2017. The initial app only involved three minutes of the phone. “But for this concert,” Egozy explained, “Evan’s idea was that we could use the same technology to write new works – this time with the audience phone and live string orchestra.”
Ziporyn said, “I drive the EV6; it’s my first electric car, and when I first bought it, it felt like I was driving an iPhone. But, of course, it’s just a car. But, it’s a car: it has wheels and an engine, and it takes me from one place to another. It seems to be a good form. A little respect for David Bowie’s song “TVC 15,” which is about falling in love with robots.”
Egozy added: “We want the audience to feel the feeling of playing together in the orchestra. With this technology, each audience member becomes part of an orchestra (wind, brass, strings, etc.). When they play together, they can hear the music of the whole part, they can hear similar music, and at the same time, they can hear different music, and they can hear a variety of music to play a variety of music. The pleasure of live performance.
After the concert, guests received six music technology demonstrations showing research from MIT Music Program and MIT Media Labs. These include game interfaces for leveraging the Justice System (Antonis Christou); insights from concerts co-created by humans (Lancelot Blanchard and Perry Naseck); a system for analyzing campus data for piano playing (Ayyub Abdulrezak ’24, Meng ’25); capturing musical functions in audio using a potential frequency masking autoencoder (Mason Wang); a device that turns any surface into a drum machine (Matthew Caren ’25); and a game interface for learning traditional Senegalese rhythms (Mariano Salcedo ’25). The final example leads to the creation of Senegrov, a drum-based application designed specifically for the upcoming EDX online course, with model performance videos provided in the music Lamine Touré by ethnologist and associate professor of MIT on music Patricia Tang, as well as world-renowned Senegalese drummer and MIT lecturer at MIT.
Ultimately, Egozy’s muse “Future Stage” shows that in this case, having the right space (in this case the new Edward and Joyce Linde music construction) can indeed become the driving force for new ways of thinking, new projects, new projects and new ways of working together. My hope is that everyone in the MIT community, the Boston community, the Boston realm, goes beyond the moment we will soon find that we built an amazing place here where we built music and space and built music and built music and built music and built music and built music and built music and built music and built music and music.