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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 Vercoe

There 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.

Barry Vercoe

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 audio—descriptors of what events to emulate when—and 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 expression—to 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 all—the universal language.


First computer: IBM 7094
Copyright 2003 MIT Media Laboratory