Dedication Introduction Dan Ariely Walter Bender Steve Benton Bruce Blumberg V. Michael Bove, Jr. Cynthia Breazeal Ike Chuang Chris Csikszentmihályi Glorianna Davenport Judith Donath Neil Gershenfeld Hiroshi Ishii Joe Jacobson Andy Lippman Tod Machover John Maeda Scott Manalis Marvin Minsky William J. Mitchell Seymour Papert Joe Paradiso Sandy Pentland Rosalind Picard Mitchel Resnick Deb Roy Chris Schmandt Ted Selker Barry Vercoe |
Barry VercoeThere is communicative power in music's attributes of emotion and beauty, and I'm driven to develop intelligent music systems that will enhance the human power to express. Every culture has used music for rituals and perceptual pleasure, and when artifacts survive they are a measure of the culture's art forms. These artifacts are also a record of its technology, since the power of musical communication attracts the best technology to its cause. Initially this gave us instruments for performance, but during the last century, we have also created devices for recording, storage, distribution, and broadcast. Now digital audio and the Internet have revolutionized music's devices and the businesses surrounding them. Future devices for capture and distribution will become as incidental as the air molecules themselves. There will be no need to transmit the vibration patterns of the air in the form of recordings; we will represent a performance via symbolic audiodescriptors of what events to emulate whenand these descriptions will take one percent of the storage space and one millionth of the transmission time of sound itself. The focus will move to digitally assisted human expressionto ways in which one person's feelings can create an ambience of goodwill and beauty to lift the spirits of another. Music from all, to allthe universal language. First computer: IBM 7094 |
Copyright 2003 MIT Media Laboratory |