From a Smart Planet interview with Tod Machover, composer and inventor
“About 15 years ago, I did a project called The Brain Opera. I’d been thinking a lot about the fact that there was music around all the time, either in your iPhone or Walkman headphones or on the elevator or in outdoor public spaces. I was really concerned about the fact that music was always playing as a background but nobody was really listening and actively participating. I made this Brain Opera as a way to say to people, “If you love music, you’ll love it even more if you touch it and make it yourself.” We made an orchestra of about 100 instruments designed so anyone from the general public could walk in from the street and play them without any instruction. That work led directly to Rock Band and Guitar Hero. It turned out to be all the basic software for those games.”
“I have a 15-year-old daughter, and she’s very musical. When a new song will come out by Lady Gaga or Björk or an orchestra or whoever, she and her friends will send it around and start making their own covers of it almost immediately. Then that’s what will get sent around. Then people will make variations of that. It’s sort of an homage to the original piece, but what kids are listening to most of the time now is not the original song at all. There may be a thousand versions out there. That’s how you share the sounds that are in the culture. The idea that people are only listening passively has actually broken down quite a bit. People are in there making things.”
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