"Greater Boston Arts," WGBH-TV's monthly series on the arts, opens its sixth season with a profile of Media Laboratory Professor Tod Machover, whom they call an "inventor committed to bridging the gap between music and technology." The segment will feature work being done at the Media Lab on interactive musical toys, including rhythmic "beat bug" instruments that communicate without wires to help children create music. Machover, who is composing a toy score for an orchestra of both children and professionals, said the toys actually have a serious intent: giving non-artists a chance to create art. The program airs Wednesday, Oct. 10 at 8 p.m. on WGBH channel 2 with rebroadcasts scheduled throughout the month on WGBH channels 2 and 44. Visit here for the complete broadcast schedule.
Machover is also composer-in-residence with the American Composers Orchestra through the American Symphony Orchestra League's "Music Alive" program. As such, he is serving as artistic advisor of "Orchestra Tech," a major festival and conference with the American Composers Orchestra and Carnegie Hall on the future of the orchestra and technology. The festival, which takes place at Carnegie Hall and other sites in New York City from October 10-14, features the premiere performance of his piece "Fireball" on Sunday, Oct. 14. Machover noted that the work, which is the opening work of the Media Lab's "Toy Symphony," uses "many new techniques and will treat the whole orchestra as a hyperorchestra, using masses of sound played by the orchestra to directly shape and control electronics."
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on September 26, 2001.
