[ELECTRONIC MUSIC PLAYING] Music technology takes
a really broad look at the ways in which
current state of technology interacts with the ways
we experience music, the way we make
music, the ways we analyze music, the
ways we consume music and distribute it. So there's a lot of
topics that we touch upon. And music technology, just like
other computational fields, students are trying to
grapple with how do we get a interaction
with a computer to represent our human ways
of experiencing the world.
Music and technology are
actually very intertwined. Music depends a
lot on technology, and technology has
a lot of potential to change the way that
music can be expressed and how people can listen to it. I'm actually a
computer science major, but I really like understanding
how come music works. I'm very interested in
human-computer interaction, and music is a medium
that really lends itself to a lot of different ways of
human computer interaction. There's a lot of
different places around the c
ountry that offer
music technology programs. But the thing that
makes MIT unique is-- well, it's actually two things. One is our approach
to how we teach it, and the second is the
students themselves. The typical student who comes
in and takes a music technology class really has
interests both in music and in computers or engineering. And what's amazing is that there
is quite a lot of MIT students who totally fit that profile. And in terms of how we teach
it, students who come and take our class
es in music
technology will be able to build the tools that
everyone else around the world will end up using to do
whatever they need to do. Music is all about
presentation and performance. And if you're just
doing engineering, you know, a lot of the time
you're not thinking about that. So combining engineering
and music, it forces you not only to be a good engineer,
but a good communicator and a good artist. I think technology can't
really stand alone. So it's very important
to have courses tha
t show you how technology
can be used in different fields, including music. One of the things that we
see is that, with increased availability to
computational tools, the creativity of people
around MIT campus and the world is really exploding,
and music technology is part of that whole explosion. So we're providing tools for
students to be creative in ways that they're already being
creative in their other domains, and we're letting
them think about things in slightly different ways. The music
technology
classes that I've taken are very interactive,
super hands-on. A bunch of my classmates
bring in their own instruments in our Interactive
Music Systems class, and they've used these
instruments in combination with the technology
stuff that we've been learning in our classes to
build some really cool tools. Like someone put together
a Cello Hero game where it gives you live
feedback about how well you're playing a piece on the
cello, which is just insanely futuristic and cool,
and reall
y helpful for people learning
how to play cello. I was an undergraduate
student here at MIT and I was also at the media
lab as a grad student, and at the time, we
didn't have a lot in terms of music
technology, certainly not at the undergraduate level. And one of the things that I'm
really excited about now coming back, 20 years later, is to
be able to create classes and introduce classes of music
technology to all the students here, who I'm guessing,
kind of like when I was an undergrad
here, r
eally want to combine this
great interest they have with music and engineering
into one discipline. [ELECTRONIC MUSIC PLAYING]
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