full interview_tod machover_27.mp3
Tod Machover [00:00:00] I'm Tod Machover. I'm a composer, do a lot of work in technology, and I'm a professor at the MIT Media Lab.
Speaker 2 [00:00:08] What attracts you about composing?
Tod Machover [00:00:14] When I was growing up. I was interested in a lot of different things. I have a, my mom was a pianist and a really creative music teacher. My dad was a technologist and one of the early people in computer graphics. And I was intrigued by both things, but I was also really interested in politics and in engagement in the world, sports, very different from what I do now. And, um, I also loved performing. Sorry, I started on the piano, but cello is my instrument. And it's kind of in high school. I played a lot of classical music then, played rock music in high school, and by the end of high school, composing was the activity that. I think there are two deep reasons why it drew me. One is that all of these diverse interests, you know, instruments, technology. Expression, engagement in the world, imagination, composing with the activity that I found that combined all of those things. And I still feel that way. And this is a weird thing to say, but I also had the feeling, and I still that way, that composing is something that I'll never completely master. It's something that there's always something different to see, there's only something else to try. And I think even at the age of 17, I had that feeling that, you know, everything else I was doing, I could imagine kind of mastering it or, but composing, I just had a feeling I never would. And I guess I was right.
Speaker 2 [00:01:52] Is there a kind of a Todd Macover sound, or something that's unmistakably you, or maybe something that...
Tod Machover [00:02:01] So I'm interested in lots of different kinds of music. And in some ways, one of my biggest interests in music is bringing disparate feelings and sounds together. So rather than there being kind of one particular sound that I can think of a lot of composers I could name who, you know, there's a characteristic rhythm or a character, probably not in my music, but I think. I think there's a blend of many elements that also feels very coherent, which I think people recognize as my sound. And maybe because I'm a cellist, I also really love writing melodies. I'm pretty good at it. So I think whatever my music feels like, there's always some kind of melodic line that ties things together. I don't know how I describe in words what those melodies are like, but they're there.
Speaker 2 [00:02:52] But looking back at even the stuff I know, and you have a big body of work, which I'm not familiar with in its entirety, but I see a really lot of different kinds of ideas. That you've tried lots of different kind of things. Do you feel that's an important thing for you to keep trying new things and pushing boundaries?
Tod Machover [00:03:16] Well, I know that one of the things that inspires me and keeps me going in composing is that. For me, I feel that I found the right project to work on when I have a pretty strong feeling of what it's going to be like, but I also have a strong feeling that I don't know exactly how it's gonna end up. And so the projects that I've been happiest about are ones indeed that develop in a way that I didn't exactly expect, and often something about the project. That I didn't necessarily think was the central element emerges along the project. And so at the end of the project, it usually opens up a door for something else I want to try. And I don't know why it is. I should probably go to a psychiatrist to find out. But first, I don't like doing the same thing more than once. Even kind of the same suite of pieces. So I think because of this idea of... Part of composing for me is discovering something and it's discovering something I didn't expect. I really want whatever I do after to feel fresh to me. And so I think people who know my music really well, I think can always tell when it's something of mine and I think see a continuity between things, but there are probably some people who don't and feel like there are probably many different worlds that I've explored.
Speaker 2 [00:04:48] You mentioned technology before. Tell us about your relationships with technology as a composing tool.
Tod Machover [00:04:56] So technology had been pretty central to what I do. In some ways, it's very natural because my dad was not just an engineer, but he was one of the first people in the field of computer graphics. So he grew up in the Midwest, wasn't a musician at all, a very visual person. And he really believed that if computers didn't have an incredibly natural intuitive way for people to interact with them, that they wouldn't catch on. I mean, this was in the early 50s when they hadn't caught on. And so he was determined to put pictures on screens and let people in, you know, there was nothing like that then. And so I grew up with that. He had businesses, I'd go to his factories and grew up seeing these things develop. And to be honest, until I was kind of in my middle teens, it didn't really capture my imagination. I mean, I kind of breathed it like the air, so I knew it, but it wasn't what I spent my time on. But when I went to college... And I'd done acoustic music, pretty good cellists, so I performed a lot. I had a rock band, so I knew a lot about kind of recording and studio technology. I was never interested in kind of Moog synthesizers and all that kind of stuff. But when I got to Juilliard, I went there to write instrumental music and actually to write textured, kind of dense, complex music. And almost immediately when I get there, I realized that I was, I didn't think of technology. I just realized I was imagining sounds and textures in my mind that didn't really sound like traditional instruments and they sounded like more going on than usually could happen in an orchestra. And so it was like a light bulb went off and I said, God, all that stuff I learned growing up. Actually, it wasn't so much the idea of the machines, it was the idea programming. The fact that if I learned how to master software, you could take an idea from your head and make it real in the world. And so when I was at Julliard, of course nobody was doing any technology there and Moog synthesizers were gone, computers hadn't really started. But I convinced, there was a computer center at City University of New York. You know, punch cards and, and so I learned how to program and convince them to let me work there. And that's when I really realized that I think software in general and technology also, I think, is the kind of language of our time, that it has this incredible flexibility that allows us to take an idea from the mind and shape either materials that allow you to work with that idea or shape actual the sounds and the performance technologies. And so it kind of came out of nowhere. I realized I'd grown up with this. This is what I needed to do. And so now, usually when I have an idea, it still is almost always one of these things is a little different than what I've done. It's a little bit different to what anybody's done. It's some kind of combination of sounds I've heard, sounds I haven't heard. It's again, kind of a perversion, But there's almost always something about what I imagine that doesn't exist and so building the studio I need or building the software or building the technology is almost always part of the initial idea. It's not something that comes afterwards and it's always connected with what I'm trying to communicate. So it's just, I don't know, I was born with that I guess.
Speaker 2 [00:08:33] I'm just going to drink a sip of water. Sorry. That was great. I love what you said about software and technology, just kind of the expression of our time. I'm not using it back to the way it was. I'd love to have you say that again and just expand on it a little bit. It's a nice sort of headline for us. Let's look at the plane in the background. That was a plane in back there? Yep.
Tod Machover [00:09:02] We didn't say there could be a plane flying over here. What?
Speaker 2 [00:09:05] I thought there was a no-fly there. No-fly!
Tod Machover [00:09:06] No flies on, that guy thought we...
Speaker 2 [00:09:09] There is a point. That's right.
Speaker 3 [00:09:16] Todd, can we just stab you a little bit with some Kleenex because you're very shiny?
Tod Machover [00:09:21] I'm very shiny. Sorry. Do I have to start again?
Speaker 4 [00:09:26] No, no, no.
Speaker 2 [00:09:27] No, no, no. Oh my god, no!
Tod Machover [00:09:29] We could add the shiny part and the unshiny part.
Speaker 2 [00:09:34] Hannah, can you read? I got it. I got. All right.
Speaker 4 [00:09:41] Oh, wow.
Speaker 2 [00:09:42] Right?
Speaker 4 [00:09:43] Good luck.
Speaker 5 [00:09:44] What about technology?
Tod Machover [00:09:47] Let's rest.
Speaker 5 [00:09:49] Do you want me to do it or do you want to show you how to do?
Tod Machover [00:09:52] You could do it, because I don't know what you're doing. So what you're doing?
Speaker 5 [00:09:55] Come and touch your skin and this absorbs any...
Tod Machover [00:09:58] Oh my god, how interesting.
Speaker 5 [00:10:00] We need to take Zoe.
Speaker 4 [00:10:04] I feel good.
Speaker 5 [00:10:06] Then we can take as long as you want. Do we want to cut the cameras?
Speaker 2 [00:10:12] It's actually easier if we just keep running.
Tod Machover [00:10:23] Alright, how about did you get the other side or did you move over there? I'm half shiny Are you good at this? Is that what the rice paper's for?
Speaker 5 [00:10:40] Yeah, I mean, I'm sure you could do other things with it, but it's good. Yeah, some Japanese supposed to be.
Tod Machover [00:10:49] Is that less shiny?
Speaker 3 [00:10:52] And now we still vote on Tuesday to help fund the project.
Tod Machover [00:10:56] Y-you what?
Speaker 2 [00:10:57] You saw a lot of e-mail from the project. With the, the, uh, the crummy-
Tod Machover [00:11:01] the crummy rest paper.
Speaker 2 [00:11:02] Well, I learned something new, you know? You know that health PIL today I learned? That's a new word for me. There you go. OK. Just give me another clap real quick.
Tod Machover [00:11:15] So I really think that technology in general, and maybe software, I mean, think of AI these days, it is, I think, the kind of common language of our time. I had this idea first personally when I was kind of in high school, going to college. It just struck me that this is the language that allows us to take something from our mind. And make it happen in the world. You know, we don't have to accept the world as it is. We don't actually accept the orchestra the way it is, we don't have to except sounds exactly the way they're presented. And software allows us to create something out of nothing, it allows us to morph something, it allow us to combine things. And I think it's an incredibly powerful tool that, you know, opens up. All the doors to creativity for society right now.
Speaker 2 [00:12:16] It's interesting because we spend a lot of time with visual artists and we also, when we first interviewed Zoe, she says, you know, a pencil is technology. If people don't think about that, there's this kind of tendency to think about new stuff and technology, but there's these old technologies. One of the things that's interesting in the visual arts with some of the people we've talked to is that their point is that computers, it's just the latest Iteration of a paintbrush. It's just another way to express you know, an artistic input.
Tod Machover [00:12:47] Yeah, I think that's not what I think. I think that technology in some ways maybe in the 60s and 70s when computers were fresh or let's say in the 80s when the personal computer came on the scene, there weren't a gazillion apps, there were not huge numbers of Photoshop programs and music software. You really have to think things through from scratch and so you have to start with idea. And then you could make software to express that idea. It didn't have to do everything. And then in the 80s, 90s up to now. Everybody, you can't do anything without technology. The tools are extremely good, much better than they were 30, 40 years ago, but they're also quite limited. They're designed for particular purposes. Most people use them like a paintbrush or like a pencil. I think the interesting part of technology is to be able to imagine what kind of writing implement you want if a pencil didn't exist, how it would feel in your hand, what it would feel like on a page. To be able design these things from scratch depending on what your idea is, that's what technology really allows. And anybody who knows how to program or is virtuosic with technology I think can get access to that. It's very strange with AI right now, which is... Incredibly powerful, I think the scary part of AI is that, like what I just said, most people don't have access to what's happening inside the AI box. So you can get some really nice software and give a visual prompt or a word prompt and come up with a whole bunch of stuff. But if you want to change that, change its behavior, it's almost impossible to do, probably harder than any technology that ever existed. So one thing we're interested in doing right now is opening up all of that AI technology so that it can be shaped and personalized for anybody who wants to use it. I think that's incredibly important for the next generation.
Speaker 2 [00:14:59] So that's the perfect segue. Tell us a little bit about your lab, the media lab. What do you do there?
Tod Machover [00:15:05] So I've worked at the Media Lab for a while now. It's kind of a remarkable place. It's part of MIT, but it's always been imagined as a kind of separate community. We're, of course, connected, but we bring in our own students, we bring in our own faculty, and it really feels like a family. It's always been designed as a place where we want as many different kind of people in the community thinking about how to make. Quality of life, better for individuals and societies. And we think that you need really, really different kinds of people, not just different disciplines like technology and learning, but you know, we need artists and engineers and designers and scientists and activists all in one place, not just coming to meet once in a while, but living together. My lab is called Opera of the Future, and it's a lab. About music and it's called opera, partly because I write unusual operas, I would say, but because opera is a form where you can bring all the senses together with sound and music at the core. And because of the environment at the Media Lab, it's been exciting over the years in my group really to take the idea of music and audio anywhere that I thought it needed to go to make an impact in people's lives. I came to the Media Lab after going to Juilliard and after working at a place called Earcom in Paris, which is a big music technology center at the Pompidou Center. Both places were fantastic, but they were pretty traditional in terms of music being something that you play in a concert hall and something that has a whole kind of profession and way that musicians deal with the public. And I think I've always... Imagine music as something that can be important outside of the concert hall and can, you know, I think the divide between professional musicians and listeners is far too large. Music's a funny thing because it's one of the most visceral art forms. It gets under our skins before we have a chance to think about it. But it also engages our minds, some people think, more fully than any other art form, be any other activity. Um, so everybody is influenced by music, but we also have a kind of, um, Oh, I think we put great musicians on a pedestal and say, you know, there are only a few people who compose great music. Everybody else shouldn't even really try. And, and there's maybe more of a celebrity cult around music than most other things. And I think that's bad for music, bad for people, bad for society. So one thing that we've really explored in my group at the media lab. How to make all kinds of activities that let anybody be involved in music whether it's learning to listen more carefully, whether it is composing, even if you haven't gone to music school. We make software called Hyperscore that uses line and color to allow, started with kids to allow people to make pretty sophisticated pieces. Now a lot of people use it. So I'm really interested in making music available in a sophisticated way to everybody. Interested in music's possible impact on our health and well-being, you know, we know music affects us deeply There's lots of research going on about why that might happen. It's kind of a golden age of Understanding how music affects this but there's so much work to do so we do a lot of that work in our in our group And I believe the music is one of the most powerful ways to bring people together you know we commune at a music festival or at a concert. We share music, it brings us together. So we do a lot of activities that try to enhance that experience. We do things that we call city symphonies where we go into a city, propose to make a sonic portrait of the city with regular music, but also with sounds that are collected. And then I invite everybody in the city to collaborate with my team and I to make this piece. And it's a kind of subversive way of using sound. As a way to get people to just literally listen to each other. You know, of course, listen to what we're trying to make. But it turns out to be a very powerful community building device. So any way that we can make music a central part of people's lives and bring us together is important to me. And my group at the Media Lab has been a perfect place to do that. I'm going to take a sip again.
Speaker 2 [00:20:03] You know, let me do a follow-up and then you can ask me. You talk about music being visceral. What happens on a really human level? What is it about music? Which is, I guess, sound waves coming through the ear. This is the thing that we've talked about with other musicians. The sound wave comes through the air, hits your ear, and somehow provokes an emotional reaction. Makes you cry. What what is it about music that seems to do that? You said it's one of the most powerful expressions
Tod Machover [00:20:42] So I do think music is particularly powerful. I will admit that for the smartest people in the world it's still a mystery as to why. And I think even the fact that you can't find a single agreement anywhere about where music started and why every society has it, it's much less connected to our everyday. Just getting through the world, then let's say vision. You know, you can see how looking at paintings isn't that different from looking at what's outside and moving through the word. Music, you know, not quite as clear. So I think actually the mystery of music is part of what touches us in ways that are hard to put our fingers on. I personally think that music without words, music with words is. Particular category because we're telling a story where, you know, people kind of follow the story through the words, which is wonderful and you know we can talk a lot about how music and words interact. But if you take away the words you know what is this stuff? You know you're hearing sound that isn't really exactly like the sound you hear of it, it's not exactly like voices, it not exactly nature, it is not exactly like machines. It's something constructed. All music is constructed to keep your attention and to take you on some kind of journey. The journey could be an inward journey to concentrate. It could be a journey through a series of emotions. I often think that one of the reasons that music is emotionally very powerful is it's often kind of a history of a relationship or a history a lifetime or a story of some particular experience that is compressed. And, but I think the fact that it's abstracted. That we're not telling you exactly what it is, is one of the most powerful things about music. So music has vibrations, it affects us physically, it goes in through our ears, we feel the vibration, we feel it in our ear, we fill it in our minds as we translate the vibration. We feel it our body, you can feel the sound in the air. You can certainly feel it at a rock concert, but you can fill it quieter music as well. And I think, especially when you go to music with real performers, And even when we listen to music, recorded music, we know enough, we've all tried singing. Maybe we've tried playing an instrument. It's a known fact that when you watch people play music, your body, your muscles reenact what it would be like to make that music. So if, you know, we don't move like a guitarist while we're listening, we, don't, you, know, Actually, some people... Um might even move their lips along with hearing somebody sing but even if we don't do that our minds reenact what it would be like to play that music we reenac the gesture which isn't the same thing we don't do that when we i don't think we do that we look at a painting or even a sculpture i don't think you look at it and your body feels the brush strokes but because music happens in time um i i think we really do So it gets under our skin both physically through the vibrations for reenacting how we think it's made, through these stories that are told, which are real stories that kind of like exercises for our emotions, but because they're not explicit, we don't know exactly who the characters are, people might disagree about the emotions. It causes us to fill in the blanks in ways that most other experiences don't. So music actually invites us to be active. In really subtle ways that most people don't realize. So I think we've become part of a musical experience really, really deeply. You know, because it's just sound waves, our mind has to do a lot of activity to figure out what the heck's going on. You know we take these raw vibrations and we turn them into frequencies. We think about time, just the passing of time, but also the division of time. So ways of comparing units, a kind of very mathematical kind of reasoning happens when we listen to rhythm and phrasing in music. Has to do with a lot of psychological and emotional evaluation. It's one of the most human activities we have.
Speaker 2 [00:25:22] Mary, do you have a specific question? You didn't answer to me, but she's...
Speaker 3 [00:25:27] At the risk of being painfully deductive, give us a single short statement about what goes on in your lab. I mean, imagine the camera coming in to do yesterday and the audience needs to understand.
Tod Machover [00:25:50] So my lab at the MIT Media Lab is called the Opera the Future Group. And it's called opera because one of our big focuses is thinking of activities that bring together all the senses with sound at the center. That's what opera does, but we try to think of it in a broader palette. And I guess the bigger vision is to number one, say that music and sound is one of the most powerful human experiences. That it touches all of us, and there's an enormous potential for music to have an even stronger role in human development, in connecting people, and in making healthy societies. So in a broad sense, that's what our group is for, and we do that through creating music itself. We try to make really interesting music on the cutting edge that gives people different experiences. We make instruments to do that, sophisticated instruments that respond very subtly to some of the best performers in the world. But I'm also really committed to opening up music making to the general public. So we do a lot of things to allow anybody to make music. We try to push the boundaries on understanding how music affects our health and wellbeing. And we do everything we possibly can to bring communities together on a massive scale through listening to music and especially through making collaborative music. So all of these things I think use sound to build better people and better societies. Is that okay, Marion? Is that still too long? No.
Speaker 2 [00:27:21] So we filmed you, you told us it was in October, we filmed conducting a rehearsal, okay. What did it mean to be conducting your own work? Is this kind of like, is the orchestra your instrument? Let's just talk a little bit about that.
Tod Machover [00:27:38] Wow, okay. Oh, yeah, sure. It's a simple answer and a longer answer. Let's see.
Speaker 2 [00:27:46] But imagine we're looking at a video of you just thinking, we just, you know, we want to connect, connect.
Tod Machover [00:27:53] So I started out in music as a performer. I started really early on as, you know, I'm the oldest of three kids. My mom went to Juilliard as a pianist, but decided to be a music teacher. So I was kind of her guinea pig as a piano student. But we used to make music around the house all the time. We'd sing in the car driving. She would have us go around the house and find objects to, and she'd say, okay, you're playing all that music that other people wrote. Now go around and find something that makes an interesting sound. We'd come together and she'd say, okay, what sound does that make and that? And we'd listen to each other's sounds. She'd say oh, what's the loudest thing you can do with that and the softest? And we listened to those. Oh, what would it be like if you made that sound and that sound at the same time? And then she'd says, okay let's tell a story with the sounds. So we'd tell a stories and then little by little after ten minutes we'd have a piece and she would say, when you go home this week, why don't you make a picture of what we just did. And when we come back next week, we'll look at the picture and we'll do this again. And so, as a kid, I really experienced the joy of making music and also in creating music. And I grew up with both of these desires. When I decided to be a composer, because I did a lot of performing on cello and on electric cello, electric bass. Actually, one of the things I like most about composing is being alone and being here in my studio where I can imagine something in my mind, sit and just hear it and feel it before I touch an instrument and before I have to explain it to anybody. Kind of like, when I was at Julliard, Beethoven was the image of how to be a composer and Beethoven was deaf, of course. And so the idea was, if you were at Jullyard and were found in the practice rooms like playing an instrument, it was like a scandal, you know, oh, so and so, they were actually playing their music instead of imagining it. So, you now, part of what I still love is that kind of solitude. And so the more composing I did, a lot of the collaboration that I love with people is actually done through inventing and through working with technology and bringing large groups together to make these operas and to build new instruments. And so over the years, I've actually performed less and less. I love playing the cello and I love conducting. But I do less of it than I used to. First of all, because of time, and second, you know, a lot of times it's really wonderful to imagine this stuff, to build it, and then to hand it off to somebody else who can see something fresh in what you've done, who can shape it, and then that allows me to stand back and to not just appreciate it, but to kind of, you No. Think about how it affects somebody, and then I can kind of fine tune it with other people playing it. So I like that role. On the other hand, sometimes it's just wonderful to jump back in and to either play myself or to be there conducting. Because conducting, without saying a lot of words, you can help shape something and you can. Show people exactly what you had in mind not surprisingly often you know I know my pieces pretty well and so there's something about just the feel of it and and you know the emotion and and the cohesion of it that would take a very long time to explain to somebody else so there is a great pleasure in conducting my own pieces and right now I'm actually. Little by little, you know, I've been doing this for a while, so I have some pieces that maybe I wrote 30 years ago. It's really exciting to come back to some of those pieces for me to rethink them and then to introduce them to kind of a younger generation of musicians and to show people how I think they go and then they can take that and bring it to others. Conducting is really hard work though, you can't be quite as objective about hearing things as if somebody else is doing the conducting. So I like to change. Which zoom level I'm at at different times.
Speaker 2 [00:32:15] Yep. That was a perfect time. Great. I will be. Ready to roll. Sound is speeding. Just a little clap for us please. Excellent. Okay, so. I'm trying to figure out how to say this, because it's not really about us, but it was proposed to you to create for the glass, to develop glass symbols. So just tell us about what appealed to you about this project.
Tod Machover [00:32:54] Can I say something about the, you know, the production, I mean the prod, because no, no, because, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 [00:33:00] No, no, because, yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously, it's good. There's also something else in here, and that is, and perhaps it's the connector from everything you've just said, where does this project fit into the trajectory of your relationship with sound?
Tod Machover [00:33:17] Okay, well that's a bigger, that's slightly different, but why don't we come to that? I'll try to answer that in this question, but we could also explicitly talk about that. And actually, it's interesting though, it goes back in some ways to... We didn't do anything with my cello or have my cell around, but it has a little bit to do with the cello, so I can... But projects come about in different ways. I've been doing this a while. And sometimes, I would say, at least over half of my projects are just some idea that comes to mind. Who knows why? Something that I think about, something I imagine, something I feel that I really want to turn into something I can share with others. So, and they're often pretty Nubby ideas, you know, they often feel really unusual at first, but I would say though, you know way more than half of my projects are things that I just dream up really care about and try to make happen one way or another by hook or by crook. Sometimes those projects take, I mean it might sound crazy, but you know sometimes it takes 10 years or 20 years to have a seed like that, find the right opportunity turn into something that feels ready to find its final form. You know, sometimes it happens fast, but often it takes a while. Other times, people will come and say, oh, you know, I've heard about something that you do, and I've a piece, it's interesting, we'd like to work with you. You know? Let's talk about something. And so then it turns into a conversation. They might say, well, first it's one of my recent pieces. This chamber orchestra, which is jointly in New York and Korea, said we have a group of 20-plus strings. We'd like to do something which is theatrical, which isn't just with our strings. So maybe with movement, maybe with some kind of story. Maybe with some electronics. Do you have an idea? It was, you know, it was, and it turned out that I was working on an opera that I thought, well, you That's it. Version of that, which would be great to try in this format. But this project was kind of unusual. I usually don't have people come to me to say, like, here's a really specific idea of something that we think would be good to do. How does that hit your imagination? And I gotta say, honestly, often when people come to me with ideas like that... I can pretty clearly, almost always, I say, thanks a lot for suggesting that. I don't think that's the right thing for me. You know, that doesn't, I thought about it. I don, I don't know what I would do with that. But for this project, we had been, you know, talking about the general idea of art and science and creativity. And you guys came to me with this very specific idea because you'd spoken to Zoe Loughlin and she had this vision. Making a symbol out of glass and what that would be as an object and what it would sound like and what would it mean to have a symbol of course made out of brass and it's indestructible and smashed the heck out of it. And even though when I first heard that idea, I thought, I mean, I could it first of all sounded like maybe it was too simple and maybe too obvious, but also it seemed really intriguing at the very beginning. And so pretty quickly, I thought. That sounds, let's meet Zoe and let's talk about it. And then, yeah, I guess we met Zoe on Zoom for the first couple of times. And you'd already told me about her, but I immediately realized what a genius she is with materials and what an unusual idea she has about what objects mean and how they feel and these suites of objects. And I just had an intuition that this was number one, a project that had. A lot of subtlety that wasn't obvious at first, and that Zoe was somebody that I trusted, you know, to work with, to find what was there. And that it would lead us someplace that I couldn't quite predict, that the obvious places weren't exactly where we wanted to go. But there was something there that we could discover. And so pretty quickly I thought this was the right thing to do, and, you know. So thank you.
Speaker 2 [00:38:15] No, I was aware that I was waiting for a moment, and he was great, and I didn't want anything to happen. It was the timing in the background. It was inspired in the background, it wasn't classless as far as I'm concerned. You mean he lives in civilization?
Speaker 4 [00:38:34] Almost.
Speaker 2 [00:38:38] So I know you had a wonderful conversation with Zoe yesterday, but just I think maybe a digest of it back just one-on-one, sort of what have you, what have you learned from this whole process? And I don't mean what's it like to collaborate on Zoom, just kind of what, you know, but about working with the glass and all.
Tod Machover [00:38:57] So in some ways, working with glass and with this totally physical object. Was a lot like my relationship to my cello. You know, cello is. It's an instrument that I've spent a lot of time with over the years, and it's totally physical. It's a really interesting, it's not like a symbol at all, but it has some interesting similarities, both the brass and the glass side. It's about the size of a human body, so you feel the vibrations when you play it. It's the only instrument that's kind of that size. A double bass is big, a violin's like, you know, too small for your fingers. A cello feels kind of like a person. It's pretty, I mean, it isn't indestructible, you can easily break it, but it's pretty strong. So, you could bang the heck out of it and make a loud sound. It's very subtle, has a huge range, has huge range of pitch, so it goes about as low as the lowest. Russian bass can sing, and it goes about as high as the highest female can sing. So it's the whole range of the human voice. And it's also, it is delicate, you know, it's, you can break a string, but it's completely physical. Whenever I try out new ideas, the two ways that I enjoy most thinking about things I haven't done before is just to sit and think, or take a walk. I love walking and thinking about whatever. But the other is to sit with my cello because I know it so well that I can kind of make interesting things, but I also know enough about it to have it lead me somewhere different. So it's a wonderful way for me to experiment. And it's extremely physical, you just feel everything about it. You feel the material, the porcelain, the gut on the strings, and the bow moving, and many different things at once. So going back to work on the cymbal in general was it's this physical object. That's all we had. And you might remember at the very beginning of the project, my mind kept going to, like a cymbals too simple. So. I've got to have a microphone on the symbol and, you know, we could take the symbol and transform its sound, you know, or, you know, and it could start as a symbol and turn into something different. You know, we do a lot of real-time AI in my lab right now. You know you could have the symbol go into some system and really come out something different, but when we started actually working with the glass And when we went to try these brass cymbals... I realized that the project had to be just about the physical stuff, without any tricks, without any technology, without extension, like working with a cello. For me, it was a revelation about how much subtlety and mystery and beauty there is in something very, very simple. And, you know, the trajectory that we've taken over this project, we started out by pushing real symbols as far as we could, and then by smashing glass and all kinds of glass, you know, delicate glass and indestructible glass, and you know with sticks and hammers and other glass, just to find the limits of this material, not even so much for sound. And then you know the process of imagining how you could make a new kind of symbol, which was interesting to me, you know, something that... Looked like a regular symbol but also maybe had layers, had different parts of it that vibrated in different ways, you know, using advanced techniques like 3D printing to make a symbol that wasn't uniform in all parts. That became really exciting. And then starting a couple of months ago when, you know, Michael started bringing these prototypes and we started, you I can immediately see. What might be difficult, you know, which techniques kept the cymbal from vibrating beautifully, which kinds of textures were really interesting and beautiful, and then in the last round, you know we took a big leap of faith. Two months ago we got the 14 inch smaller cymbals and they looked beautiful and didn't sound very good. They were dull. I was really worried, you know, there are always several stages of a project when I get really worried. It's like, this is a great idea, but you know I don't see the next step, but we discussed it together and we decided that there was a real possibility that it was just too small and that by scaling it to the large size that we imagined, there'd be enough extra glass to vibrate freely into and, you know, these are. Time-consuming to make, they're expensive, they take a lot of Michael's time and we couldn't make hundreds of them so we had to decide either to kind of stop or to compromise and make an intermediary size or to go for the big size. We went for the big size and when I went and picked those up in New York from Michael and got them home and took it out of the crate and for the first time tried this simplest version in a giant size and saw that... It was just magical, you know? It just sounded like something really different and... And the range of sound, the openness of its vibration, and the delicacy all together. I mean, it's glass and, you know, a cello is wood and you have to be careful, but you know. I mean I broke several of these in the last few weeks, just experimenting, not at all trying to break them, being pretty, but, you now, so they're on the edge. All those qualities. Really surprised me in an incredibly powerful way. And as I'd always hoped, and as something like the cello suggests. Having these symbols led me to think of what to do with them. I mean, I kind of learned along the way that I didn't know exactly what to expect at each stage. So it didn't make a lot of sense. I had to come in with, you know, here's exactly what I want this glass to do. Cause I knew it would, but once they were here, I could see, oh my God, let's experiment. And let's, you now, what's the range and, you know, how many different sounds and which aspects can you change and what does that mean? And, and how is it interesting to somebody else? Indeed, it's not just an object, a physical object, but it's led all of us, the process, and then the objects themselves have led all us to imagine and to hear things we couldn't have any other way. I'm sorry, but there's something very emotional about this whole process, not just having developed these, but having these things that are both so beautiful and are going to break. The whole idea of playing with them and sharing them and what it means to make a piece out of them and an experience, it's kind of, I think that's what Zoe's vision was at the very beginning, that, you know, that's, what's so heartbreaking or poignant or, you know maybe, maybe aspirational. I mean it's, you make these and then they're gonna go away. There's something really special about, about spending time with these symbols and sharing them with others and making a piece out of them. And I'm just grateful to have had this opportunity.
Speaker 2 [00:47:38] I don't have any more questions about the symbols, we have a couple of other questions related to other things in our show, so this is the last time to ask about the symbol.
Speaker 3 [00:47:48] I'd like to ask if there's a simple way, I mean you've not fully written the composition, but as you said earlier, we were watching you in real time begin to come up with it. And as a piece of music, you've written a great deal of music. Wide variety of music How is this in the trajectory of music that presents things you never knew before? Is it? Somebody will hear it ten years from now. We'll see this recording ten years from now and you'll think, oh god that's got to be telling that girl. It certainly can't be. Do you know what I'm saying? Just a, a simple...
Speaker 4 [00:48:29] Mmm, yeah, yeah.
Tod Machover [00:48:45] So one of my heroes and mentors was Marvin Minsky. And Marvin was one of the inventors of the field of artificial intelligence. He was a professor for his whole career at MIT. It's one of reasons I came to MIT was to be around him. And he also was a piano prodigy. So he grew up playing piano and thinking a huge amount about how music works. I mean, he was one of the great thinkers about music. He was an incredible improviser, and he was one of the only people I ever knew who could improvise and think very consciously about what was going on in his mind while he was improvising. So he could make something up, and he'd say, oh, you know, that chord is stuck, and what are my possibilities? And you know like, can I change this note? And he always used to say, so he always use to say people are either divided, they're either improvisers or composers. And it's a really different activity. So whenever you would say that, I would think, that's probably true, and you're an improviser and I'm a composer. And composers are people who plan and generally who want the extra time to try that thing and then say, okay, maybe, but because of what comes after I'm gonna go back and revise that. And it's much more iterative. And usually you do that in private before you share it with somebody else. So one side of me really is that kind of composer and I love to spend as much, I work pretty quickly, but I love spend as time as I need to get something just right. On the other hand, especially again, I keep bringing up my cello, but especially through the cello I love to improvise, I'm a pretty good improviser too. And you know, I love to improvize on my own and just see where music goes. I love improvise with others and you know the cellos a bass instrument. So. It's, I grew up, you know, it's an instrument where you're often supporting what other people do. You know, people, people's attention isn't driven necessarily to the bass line. So you know I love this idea of playing along with people and helping them move along. And when I started out as a composer, I would say all my music was in the composing category. Like I wrote, you, know, pieces for symphonies and, and you know it's really our performers and they needed a score, they needed... I thought they needed that, and little by little, my music often is a combination of both and there's often sections which are very carefully written out and then they often evolve into a section where I give freedom to the performers and the freedom depends on the piece, but it might be, you know, for about this long. Hear the kind of sounds that I want you to make and I want to use these notes and not other notes, but exactly which order they come in and exactly how fast they evolve, that's up to you. And the reason for that is that performers feel differently if everything's laid out for them and if there's freedom. And I actually think that, I didn't think of this consciously, but a lot of my pieces flow between those two states. You can feel it in the way people play, you can feel in the way you listen to it. Nobody thinks of it, but you kind of, your listening gets liberated when people are, you know, less constrained. And This piece for the cymbal, I think, well, first of all, I originally imagined that I was going to write a piece with a score and give it to, like, a fantastic percussionist. I'm not a percussionist, you know, I have a pretty good sense of rhythm, but you know I never studied percussion, I never got up to play a drum set or anything like As the project went along and I realized that, I couldn't really make a piece out of this till I had the real symbol, because the symbols we were getting had, each one had like a part of it that had the right feel, but you know, it wasn't the whole instrument. So I knew that working with the actual material was gonna come later and later in the project, and that I would have to be open to what came about. And I still could have written a piece for somebody else. The more these instruments started developing, the more I started to think that. It was more an improvised piece with a structure in mind and that I should probably play it. Just like sometimes I like to conduct, it felt like rather than translating this for somebody else to play, kind of touching the symbols was part of making a structure out of it. Given that, I think, you know, for me the most important things in my pieces is the journey they take you on. You know, they're always some kind of emotional journey, some kind of development, some kind of transformation. You know, you can like it or not, but I think I've always been pretty good at keeping someone's attention and taking you somewhere where part of that journey is clear and part of it is ambiguous. So, you know, I don't want to be too clear because It just doesn't appeal to me. I want there to be questions at the end. But the way I do that, I think is actually very similar in a lot of my pieces. And the way that I do in this piece is the way do things. And so the big challenge with the cymbal piece is that from the very beginning we knew that the cybal had to break. And... I really, really wanted to avoid, you know, everybody knows that or expects probably that could happen, maybe it's supposed to happen, but 99.9% of the ways you can think about that are pretty obvious. You know, you just hit something harder and harder and eventually, or you know the kind of way you'd break things, the kind of way we broke glass in London where it was kind of a festival of smashing things. When I got these symbols, partly because they're so complex and beautiful, that's not the way I felt about them. I realized immediately that I didn't want something where everybody was like, okay, okay, you know, the drum solo's building up, it's gonna break. So I had to figure out some way that maybe it pushed in that direction, but pulled back and brought you to someplace where you didn't know. So part of this had to be about making people feel incredibly close to those cymbals and feel the same kind of. You know, intimacy with them that I do now that I've worked with them. You have to feel how delicate they are rather than how... And I think you have to feel pulled to the edge. But then... The actual act of finding their limits. I think I've constructed something where it's ambiguous and it's actually connected with the same behavior of the symbol that is almost like a meditation. So the same thing that gets them vibrating and resonating in full, which actually isn't a violent act, is also the thing that they resonate too much. So I think not just kind of as a piece so that it works, I've constructed it that way. Pressing. The emotional journey of where these symbols take you. I think the story of it is very similar to the way I construct pieces in general. It's a different story because it's a different medium and it's the new piece and the emotions and what it makes people think about, I think is unique to this piece. But yeah, I think people who know my music would probably would feel like they've, again I think when you hear a piece of mine, it's where I've taken you that. That I think sticks with people. There are no melodies though, because you can't play enough notes on these cymbals to actually make a tune. I realized that pretty quickly too. So it's about sound and resonance and fullness and delicacy and everything but melody.
Speaker 6 [00:57:51] That was wonderful. The question is a good follow-up to that question. Come on. I've had.
Tod Machover [00:57:57] This is all going to be cut down to like 10 seconds though, right? How are you going to do? You know, like speed it up. How are going to to do this?
Speaker 2 [00:58:05] What if the bottle says my name written on the label?
Tod Machover [00:58:07] And actually, Chris, just before you do, let me just take a quick look, because since we're stopping for a second, just there's so many things going on, I just want to make sure there's no emergency.
Speaker 2 [00:58:21] All right, let's roll. We're ready. All right. So Chris is going to ask you, but you're looking at a little clap first.
Tod Machover [00:58:29] Yep, let me do a little burp before I do a little clap.
Speaker 6 [00:58:39] You can also look at me while I ask you, but just make sure you answer the living. Talk to them over here, Sam. Yeah, yeah.
Tod Machover [00:58:43] Yeah, yeah, I can hear you.
Speaker 6 [00:58:45] So, I've asked this to other artists, and I don't think it's interesting, but you're uniquely positioned to answer this, which is, you know, that moment in your mind when, if you're painting or composing or writing, something is it. It clicks. That is correct. That's the word you use, but I want you to pick a word. What can you describe that feeling when you know something is... Quote-unquote right for you when you're making a piece of art, especially as it relates to an instrument that's never existed.
Tod Machover [00:59:20] And why do you say I'm uniquely qualified to answer this?
Speaker 6 [00:59:23] I'm thinking that on that side of people who play instruments that have existed for hundreds of years, how do you know something's correct on something that no one's ever heard of?
Tod Machover [00:59:36] That's a really hard question. I mean, I know, you know, I can imagine people gave you pretty clear answers. So. Um CLEAR So I think for me Two ways. One is that I think the reason I work in music and the reason I make art is to explore feelings, ideas, engagement, and attitude towards the world that are new, that open up something different for me, that open a creative approach to the world. So to me, the most exciting thing about creating something is to enter a territory that I don't know. B-because of that it's often difficult to say. When you found exactly the right thing, because what you're looking for is always different. When I said I was gonna say the opposite, I think I would say that to me, the most important value in living is probably being creative and being able to see the world with fresh eyes, hear it with fresh ears all the time, rather than to. See things like a replay or like a cliche. And so I think making art is one of the most powerful ways we have of allowing us to do that. For me, they're kind of two stages in working on any project. I usually don't. I often don't make any sound in the real world until I've spent time to feel and imagine and hear in my inner ear what it is I'm trying to make. So there's a, so I usually start with. I don't even know how to describe it. Sometimes it's a sound, sometimes it's feeling, sometimes it is an idea, something that really is important to me. And then I usually spend a couple of weeks, a few weeks. Trying to imagine what that is, trying to let that grow inside my head. And there's a moment where I feel, okay, that's, I see what that can be. I believe in this and this is, you know, I don't know exactly what it's going to be at the end, but I know this is the right thing for me to work on. I know I can, I know what it is going to feel like to experience it when it's done. That allows me to start. And then, then it's always fun to make things, but it's really hard because. Then you have to find the right thing, you have to find that actual sound, and the actual continuity, and how long is this. And so there are all these specific decisions which on their own are kind of little, but that's what the piece is. And it's in making those decisions that this thing comes alive. So before that it's kind of a feeling, it's an idea, it' an abstraction. And then by making it, it is when you discover all these things. And then it's the funniest thing, but... I think I've known this ever since I started, I don't know why it is exactly. But I think for all those individual decisions, I know immediately when it's the right thing. It either comes right away or you look and it's like, oh, that's the sound or that's it. And I tell my students this all, I believe this deeply, there's no book you can write for somebody about how you make that judgment. There's no theory about it. There's, I mean, I know all the theory and I make up my theories, but that's not how you those decisions. They're all in some context that you've never done before and you know it's not like a general idea of harmonies because that's the right thing for right now and that's what I love doing most is finding those incredible every step of the way and then when they all fit together, the piece is right, you know, so it's kind of... It's kind of come alive in making all these individual decisions based on the vision at the beginning. And I always find, you know, it's like most things in life, while you're in the middle of making it, it feels like maybe you've gone off in some completely different direction and like, oh my God, I can't even remember where I started or what. And then when it's all together, I always it's, like, wow, you, know? It absolutely came from that. And yes, it's born now, it turned into, you know, it not exactly the same. Hopefully it's better or it's different, but it's totally, you know it grew out of that. It always feels right, you know, and then music's also funny because even though I can work on my keyboard or make sounds as I'm doing it, write it down, it never really exists until either you go into the studio and produce it or until you go and perform it and it's out in the world and you can step back and hear it. And then I almost always feel, oh, you know. I see why I made that, I can feel why I make it, I usually like it, there's something that makes me uneasy about it, but I almost always after not too long a time think, wait there's something in that that has promise and that suggests something different that I have to try next, that's always how I get the next idea. So it's never perfect, it's maybe perfect for what it was meant to be, but it always kind of suggests something else.
Speaker 2 [01:06:22] Maybe as simple as yours.
Tod Machover [01:06:25] Well, I mean, I think, I just think, you know, what are people going to say about how it's exactly right, how you know when it's right?
Speaker 2 [01:06:32] It's an unanswerable question, but you're an incredible person to sort of muse on it.
Tod Machover [01:06:38] Yeah, no, I can't wait to see the series and see what people said.
Speaker 2 [01:06:42] Everybody's got a different. Of course. Andrew, do you have anything more on symbols? No, I don't. I just think we should move on to whatever else we might want to. These are just a couple. These are general questions related to. Do you know the group, group full of teeth?
Tod Machover [01:06:56] I do, Mary and I have talked about it, but I do know them. I don't know them like incredibly well, but of course I know who they are. But of course I know who they are.
Speaker 2 [01:07:02] It's interesting for us about them, apart from the music we think is very beautiful. It's sort of, it seems to really be pushing the potential of the human voice. They don't use instrumentation, they use magnifying the voices. So I don't know if we're just kind of like a thought that you have. I mean you do have voice in some of your work, but just what is it about the human voice? I mean it's a little bit about, I don't know Mary if you have a specific question you want to ask. What is the human voice in this grand trajectory of musical instruments?
Tod Machover [01:07:46] So you won't get anybody to agree on where music started. Um, some people say it started from toolmaking. Uh, and actually I know somebody at Oxford who spends every summer going out to archeological digs and they find bones and they look at the pattern on the bones to find out if they were likely used as tools and maybe starting out as tools, and then because of the sound the tools made, they say, Oh. That's a cool rhythm, let's try just banging these together. Or the opposite, that they have a pattern that looks like they started out, oh, that's cool sound. And then, oh it's eroding, so maybe I can use that to, so you know, is it from objects banging against each other? Is it from walking, from sounds our bodies make, sounds we hear in nature? Certainly one of the strong contenders for where music comes from is the voice. Um, you know, the voice is probably the most intimate sound we make with our bodies. Um, You know, we really feel the vibration when you use your voice, even when you're just speaking, but if you sing, you know, it vibrates your chest cavity as you feel it all through your head. Um, your voice is like it's in your head, so all the brain circuits that allow us to vocalize and to process our voice. Are incredibly complex. The way we process our own voice is different than the way we hear other people's voices. So this idea that you hear a recording of yourself and you say, whoa, that doesn't sound like me. It's not just because you're self-conscious. It's because you actually don't hear your own voice the way other people do. And all of that means the voice is incredibly intimate. It also means that, you know, it's something that is very personal. Which means that we respond to it, it allows us to express ourselves, but also many people are incredibly uncomfortable about their voices. We don't necessarily like the way our voices sound. You know, the number of people who say I can't sing, you know, I always hang out of tune. I mean, so it's something that we're very touched by in good and bad ways. Of all the music instruments, because there's no external physical support, it's also very difficult. You know, you can learn a piano, you can just by figuring out which key to press at the right time. String instruments are more complicated, you know, guitars have frets, so you kind of know more or less. Cellos and violins have no frets. So, you know learning, like where to put your finger is harder, but at least you have a string you know, something to press on, some reference. The voice, you don't have anything like that. So, you know, continuous vibration. I have enormous respect for people who train their voices and learn how to master all of this complexity. And of course, what's so interesting in the past hundred years is that just as people in the early 20th century started thinking that the pallet of sound available for making music is much larger than just the instruments that ended up in the orchestra. People like Vérez in the 20th Century said, you know, machines make noise, nature makes noise. We should be able to incorporate that noise into our orchestra. And that grew and grew and drew into sampling and to every sound that's possible now. And of course, the same is true with the voice. You know, for a long time, the idea of what... A singing voice could be either for popular music or for singing Christmas carols or for singing on the opera stage, a certain way of using the voice in each context was pretty well-defined. But, you know, in the last, certainly since World War II, the idea that the voice is limitless, you, know, it's, I mean, voice is speaking and it's shouting and it you know, making, hmm, just emotional sounds and singing and all of that is part of what we can use to express. It's all part of being human. This is just, I'm sorry, there's Steve, the other Steve about to come in and open a door if you want to tell him not to do that or.
Speaker 2 [01:12:27] And I think you're probably ready to be wrapped up.
Tod Machover [01:12:31] Um.
Speaker 7 [01:12:34] But I have Sanctus batteries, but that is... I've been here since the cymbals have been here, so...
Tod Machover [01:13:07] Or just stand, you know, whatever.
Speaker 2 [01:13:09] Alright, why don't you give us a clap, because I think we're rolling.
Tod Machover [01:13:14] Welcome back.
Speaker 2 [01:13:16] We're just wrapping up here for a different day.
Tod Machover [01:13:29] So there's a lot of debate about where music came from. Nobody agrees. Some people think it came from tool-making. Some people can't think it might've come from walking, sounds our body makes, sound of nature imitating birds. But a strong contender is that it might have come from vocalizing because expressing ourselves through our voices is so fundamentally human. Some people even think that language might've might've came from singing and that maybe we first made emotional sounds with our voices and then. Made them more specific to try to convey meaning. So the voice is central to what we do. It's the only instrument that's actually completely inside our body, which means that it's part of our body. We feel it. We feel the vibration all over when we sing. We feel in our brain, the voice is connected with our brains in really complicated ways because our hearing mechanism is right here and we hear our own voice differently than we hear other people's voices. Um, so it's incredibly intimate, um, over, you know, for a long time, singing, what singing meant was pretty carefully defined, um whether it was operatic singing or pop singing or folk singing or just singing, you know, with friends, um it had to be on pitch and it has to be in tune, perhaps, um in an opera house, it had project to 2000 people. But in the last hundred years or so, the idea of what's musical and what's not musical has broadened enormously. The orchestra incorporates all kinds of sounds now. Sampling allows us to take any sound and combine it with any other instrument. Certainly since World War II, we've thought of the voice as something that might sing a melody, but it also might scream at you, or it might cry, or it may gurgle, and it might say words. So the voice has enormous range. Everybody understands the voice, so it's also incredibly communicative. They've grown up a whole generation of performers who think about the voice in a much broader context. And what's so exciting is to find performers who can sing perfectly, but then also can control all these other sounds perfectly and combine them with the kind of skill and technique that never would have been possible before. And Room Full of Teeth is certainly one of the most prominent ensembles right now. Masters the entire range of vocalization, commissions, repertoire, both from their own members and from other composers that invite people to think about this repertoire of sounds. And there are lots of wonderful performers around the world mastering this new idea of the breath of the voice and how it can engage listeners in different ways. Is that okay?
Speaker 2 [01:16:28] No. No. OK. Great. All right. Room tone, please. Did you ever hear?
Tod Machover [01:16:33] Did you ever hear, we never talked about it, did you ever hear Stimmung by Stockhausen? It's such a great piece. I mean, yeah, yeah. He wrote that in like 68 or something like that. And yeah, I think it's more interesting than anything Rune Philip Teeth is doing. It's an incredible hour and a half. I mean you get it. Question.
Speaker 2 [01:16:53] This question is not available. It is available. He's not available, he's dead. Can we just get some room time? A few seconds of everybody being quiet. Room time.
full interview_tod machover_21.mp4
Speaker 1 [00:00:01] So tell us, where are we in the process and how do you feel about today?
Tod Machover [00:00:07] So today is what we're about five weeks from performance. And today's pretty exciting because we've been working for the last while on the idea of a glass symbol and the characteristics of a class symbol. Zoe and I have been talking about this concept for a year, whatever. Michael joined the project four or five months ago, and so today Michael arrived with two smaller versions of the symbol we've been talking about, and he managed to fly with them from Rochester without them coming, ending up here in pieces. And when we met, it was just a week ago or maybe 10 days ago. We had talked about how to get variety out of these symbols and the idea is to print them in layers, three layers in this case. And I think Zoe had the idea, we all talked about it, it was Zoe's idea to try two configurations. One quite geometric and regular where in principle the parts of the symbol that sounded quite different would be really easily recognizable. Kind of like a keyboard, but you know, a rectangular patch and a rectangular patch with bumps and dots and another one where the configuration was quite a bit more fluid. And we'd actually had a discussion last time about how there are different ways of designing an instrument like a piano keyboard. Everything's regular, spaced the same throughout the whole range of the piano, an instrument like a a symbol of the kind of middle European instrument where you play a bunch of strings with things that look like forks. It turns out if you if you design that with the notes in chromatic order like on a piano the instrument would be way too big and unplayable. So they're actually designed according to the intervals you're most likely to play and they all overlap and it's easier to play like that. So the second symbol was designed with that in mind that it's actually the way I like to think of instruments if you have these different areas which kind of run one into another. So anyway, the first thing about today is Michael arrived with these things and sure enough, these symbols look exactly like the designs. I mean, I was really surprised. I figured, you know, by the time they got. Manufactured and the layers put on, I figured it just wouldn't be as precise or the, you know, you couldn't tell. But they really look exactly like what Zoe sketched on paper. So that was really exciting. They arrived intact, they're quite solid, and that's what we're dealing with now. They're very solid. So, you now, the last time we actually, the last I played with resonating glass was when we were all in London in, I think it was October, we're now at the end of April. And that's the time when we had access to all the real symbols and then to all kinds of glass. And, you know, it was pretty clear that the more delicate the glass, the finer the stem was, the easier it was to make them resonate. You know, they resonated longer and even with a delicate glass. The sound just was quite different if you moved from where the stem was to the edge to the top and actually hitting two delegate glasses together made really interesting sounds. And I didn't know what to expect with these cymbals, but I think they actually sound quite good if you hit them pretty hard, but they don't resonate as long as I expected them to and they also don't have quite as much variety as I expect them to. The all of the extra layers that create these beautiful patterns and make a lot of sense. Rather than kind of opening up the resonance, they seem to dampen them. So they resonate quite nicely if you hit them on the edge and if you get the areas that only have one layer. They just don't sound as open when you hit the other areas. The bumps and ridges, actually the one thing that was a nice surprise with these symbols is that they were molded from regular symbols. And so the glass surface has similar kind of concentric ridges to what you'd find on a brass cymbal. That's actually really nice, because if you drag your fingers or a drumstick just along the surface, you get a nice kind of gritty sound, bumpy sound, and you can kind of stir it. It sounds very beautiful. But the intentional bumps and ridges that were made in the glass printing. Because they're buried between, they're usually in the second layer so that they're covered over on the bottom layer and the top layer. So it's kind of a little bubble in between. At least in this version, they just don't resonate. So it doesn't sound different when there's a little bubbles.
Speaker 1 [00:05:22] So is it, can you say it's a little disappointing? Can you use that word? How do you feel about this? This is part of the process as you know from us.
Tod Machover [00:05:32] Yeah, totally. So to be honest, I'm not so surprised because the first time we got a real symbol made out of glass, you know, the last few meetings that we had on Zoom, Michael was in Rochester banging the glass through Zoom. You know, I knew that we couldn't really hear exactly what they sounded like, and it sounded a little dull through Zoom, So, I am, let's say, if we have to make the concert tomorrow... I would be concerned about, I mean, I've made all kinds of concerts over the years. We could use these cymbals and do something terrific, but I think we do need to figure out how to make them more resonant and more varied. And there are different ways of doing that. It could be that, you know, these are, I think, 14 inches and we're, the final version would be maybe 26 inches. It's probably larger enough that... The thickness, I think will, these feel thick. And hopefully when it's spread out like a pizza dough, just the extra volume will make it feel thinner, which means hopefully it'll be more varied and more resonant. I'm not 100% sure that this layered approach with these bumps and different textures. Is ever going to work exactly the right way, you know, my intuition is that... I would probably make the bumps more exaggerated and the ridges more exaggerated, maybe even cut them through so you could, you know, something like that, or make more sound out of those. And I was speaking to one of the postdoctoral students in my group today, and she happens to be an acoustics expert. She works on the way that you design buildings to create emotional response, especially religious buildings. And I just said, you know, she came in and said, oh my God, they're gorgeous. How do they sound? I said, well, they sound pretty good, but they're a little dead. And she looked at them and said... First of all, she had some colleagues at University of Michigan where she got her PhD who had been working on resonating glass objects. And she, in fact, sent me a paper from them and I'll send it to all of you and to Michael and Zoe just so we can think a little bit. But she said her impression was that... Most resonating glass objects aren't quite as flat as this and they tend to be a bit more curved or maybe a lot more curved and sure enough I looked up that Michigan work and they were, they're almost like balloons made or pillows made out of glass, so they had air inside and then, you know, the air resonates and then they have the leisure of developing different materials of glass to make them deader or more alive. So, you know, We're only five weeks from the performance, it takes time to make these, it costs money to make these prototypes. We know we can't make, you know, many more, so um... I think we have to make a couple of bold decisions, probably tomorrow, you know, it's the end of the day today. I know Michael's going to be doing some waterjet printing tomorrow, laser cutting, I'll be around all day, I'm going to think tonight. And yeah, my guess is we want to exaggerate the surface deformations. I don't know, maybe we want it to go even bigger than 26 inches. It feels like. The one thing I was disappointed in, and I'm a little surprised at, is that, you know, I thought that the big advantage of glass printing was the variety that you could get and maybe a certain control over the glass that you can't get any other way. And these symbols just feel thick to me. And I gather from what Michael said is you just can't print anything thinner than that. So, I'll ask him again, you know, whether there's anything to do just to... Compress it or... Think that's probably what's making it not resonate so much. Well, I think I think what's unusual with this project is that Because these physical objects take a long time to make and because Zoe's the designer, but she's not fabricating them and Michael's yet somewhere else, we haven't been able to make so many and try them. So I think we haven't been able to iterate with real stuff, considering we're doing something that nobody's ever done before. We did try. Resonating and breaking all kinds of different glass in Zoe's lab in October, but we haven't and I think we all felt at that time that what a range, you know, incredible possibility and, you know delicate, hard, you, know the breakability. There was just a huge amount of drama there and until today we haven t had a chance to touch or resonate other glass. So... That's just the way this process has been, it's a bit unusual, and we can't make a lot of iterations now, so we've learned a lot. And you know, we're smart people, I think we'll be able to make a couple of twists to make this, I'm not worried, maybe a little disappointed, but I'm worried we'll come with something really interesting.
Speaker 1 [00:11:09] It just seems to be part of the creative process. I mean, today it's symbols, but it could be something else, right?
Tod Machover [00:11:14] Yeah, and you know, I do think that it's, at least for the way I work, it's quite par for the course to have an image. Maybe at the first rehearsal or at some part in the process, the musicians come in for the first time and it's like, oh, it sounds, you know, that's, what did I do wrong? You know, it's too, often with my work, since it's fairly complex, maybe it sounds like mud, you know like, oh, all the stuff I put in there, it's not clear. And I usually get kind of upset after the first rehearsal or two and then. And then it kind of goes back and forth. It gets better, and then there's a, again, you know, but it always gets there. And I think, you now, I think the one thing, besides the resonance, the one that we really do want to solve with these symbols is that from the very beginning, Zoe's original idea was the combination between a symbol, which you think of as kind of indestructible, pound it, and makes this resonance out and turn it into something which is incredibly fragile. These things aren't fragile enough yet. So the whole story of something which you're going to push to the edge and pull back and push to edge and finally I think we just have to, if that isn't clear and if you need a sledgehammer to break this, it's probably not the right story. But I think we all saw that today, and one way or another we'll get there.
Speaker 1 [00:13:01] I'm good. Anybody else? Do you want to just take one and hold it like it's your baby?
Tod Machover [00:13:11] That's easy.
Speaker 1 [00:13:12] A baby you have no time.
Tod Machover [00:13:13] A baby what?
Speaker 1 [00:13:14] Maybe you have notes on. Notes on. Maybe not your baby yet. Tell us how, when you look at it, what are you feeling when you're looking at it?
Tod Machover [00:13:30] I love the pattern, I love this shape. It's incredible how different it is in different light and, you know, there's certain, like right now looking at the back of it, it's getting dark outside and we've turned the lights down a bit here. But because it's shiny on the back, all of the complexity, you can't see it from sitting but from where I'm sitting. You can see all the different contour on the back, both in the major pattern, but also all the subtle little. I don't want to say imperfections, but complexities, which I love. Right now in this light, looking at the front, it looks flat. It doesn't have that same complexity and beauty to it, so to me it looks matte and kind of... So I think... I think the light, I think they're incredibly variable, which probably is nice, probably also something to play with. It doesn't always look the same. The light changes, the angle changes it. I personally wish they were lighter. You know, it's heavy. I want it to be like half as thin. How could you, like sandpaper, you couldn't like sand off.
Speaker 1 [00:15:10] Rub it, rub it, Rub it.
Tod Machover [00:15:12] Is there anything with glass that would do that?
Speaker 3 [00:15:15] I think so.
Tod Machover [00:15:17] Sandpaper wouldn't, but there must be some, there must be like a glass, like a drill with a mesh on it or something like that. I mean, I wonder. Maybe, you know, maybe that's a thought, because the process has been interesting. Because a lot of it's been conceptual, Zoe's made sketches, she'd been thinking about it. I think the glass printing is kind of a really pure process, you know, you give it to, you have to make the design precisely, you give to a machine, the machine makes it. You know, maybe somehow deforming this by hand at this point, making it thinner, making it less regular. I know we could like hang wine glasses from it.
Speaker 4 [00:16:21] What did you learn about sound today? Did you make any discoveries about sound and glass? Glass on glass.
Tod Machover [00:16:34] I think, well, actually one thing we didn't say before is that it turns out that You know, we tried, I brought in a bunch of drumsticks with different materials and different weights. They all had different characteristics. The more solid, the heavier, more solid ones definitely produced more variety. You know you could be hitting them hard, made it resonate, it also had more richer spectrum. Hitting not just with the tip of the stick, but with kind of the whole side of the sticks also made a more complex sound. But when we I mean, I'm holding them, not with my finger, but. Having the two cymbals actually. Oh, we didn't try that. Actually Marion, you were saying the other day, are we using one symbol or are we using like the typical crash symbol? And there's something kind of magical about the two symbols resonating with each other. And it also feels more dangerous that way.
Speaker 1 [00:18:16] That sounded like that was getting closer to the edge than any other time in it.
Tod Machover [00:18:20] Yeah That's pretty beautiful. That's a different sound than we had before. Let's see. That's, that resonates, that glass table resonates the glass symbol in an interesting way, but the table didn't vibrate at all. So we did make something that actually vibrates. That's good. The glass table doesn't. So maybe one thing I'm learning is that... Maybe a drumstick on these isn't the right thing. Maybe it's glass on glass or other kinds of objects. Maybe even a ball. Maybe it is maybe one exploration are the kinds of things that unleash the properties that are there. And maybe a drum stick is just, you know. Too simple. So maybe I learned that since we don't have a lot of experience trying to draw sound out of glass, maybe thinking that it behaves just like a symbol isn't the right way of thinking about it. And we have to resonate in a different way and break it in a different way. So that's what we'll do. If that doesn't work, we can always serve cheese on it.
