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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 country 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 classes 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
that 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 really 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, really want
to combine this great interest they
have with music and engineering into one discipline.
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