The MIT Music Technology and Computation (MTC) Graduate Program — launched in fall 2024 as a collaboration between the Music and Theater Arts Section within the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), and the School of Engineering (SoE) — presented its inaugural MIT Music Technology Research Showcase on May 13. The event played to a standing room-only house within the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Constructing’s Thomas Tull Concert Hall and featured diverse and fascinating research presentations and music performances.
The celebratory occasion featured MTC’s first five enrollees (all of whom were previously MIT undergraduates), alongside several PhD students and school. Each scholar presented inspiring exemplars of artful engineering that reflected the broader and burgeoning music technology scene at MIT.
The 90-minute event exhibited a broad array of research projects, including a real-time visualization of what an AI co-improvising agent is about to play on a piano; a sound-art installation based on noisy network communication; a hip-hop dance circle where music is generated from dancing; and the usage of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals to discover the musical tunes that our brains are imagining.
“A brand new space for exploration and insights”
An interplay of technical presentation with live performance, the showcase began with remarks from SHASS Dean and professor of philosophy Agustín Rayo, SOE Dean and professor of chemical engineering Paula Hammond, and MTC Director and professor of the practice of music Eran Egozy.
Rayo began, “The goal of this program is straightforward — for MIT to guide the world in music technology theory and application,” adding “it’s not nearly making music with technology; it’s also about working across disciplines to assist higher shape the longer term of expression in an AI-driven world, all while reflecting MIT at its best.”
Rayo noted the graduate program was made possible partially by the opening of the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Constructing in 2025, which provided recent classrooms, studios, rehearsal spaces, and a dedicated music technology lab. He also credited the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing for its support for the graduate program.
Hammond followed: “As those on this room already know, music and engineering share some common roots. Each depend on mathematical precision and are informed by defined structures, rhythms, and frequencies. Each demand labor and technical know-how, paired with inspiration and imagination, to create something entirely recent. Given those congruities, it’s no surprise that so many faculty, students, and staff members across MIT are also achieved musicians and artists.”
She continued, “Our music program is a gem. Only at MIT could we bring the highest technologists and the highest musicians together to create unique opportunities for collaboration. Here now we have brought together faculty and students who discover strongly with each music and engineering to form a brand new space for exploration and insights. It’s a powerful example of the collaborative culture that defines the Institute.”
Egozy called the event a “harmonious hybrid of concert and symposium,” and recollected, “it’s a bit of mind-boggling to see what our students have achieved in only one short and fast-paced 12 months. While we originally debated the trade-offs between a one-year and a two-year master’s program, I believe this cohort really showed us that we will make huge strides in learning and research abilities in a concentrated time frame.”
Student research on display
Considered one of those students is Claire Southard ’25, SM ’26, who developed a machine-learning model used to discover musical notes hidden in EEG signals.
Southard explains, “yearly, musicians are diagnosed with movement disorders corresponding to Parkinson’s disease and dystonia, or experience injuries that prevent them from controlling their hands and bodies within the ways required to play their instruments. For this reason, too many musicians are forced to stop doing what they love. My work explores one technique to help such musicians perform again by translating the music they’re attempting to play directly from their brain activity — bypassing the necessity for motor control altogether. To do that, I trained machine-learning models to predict the music an individual is imagining from their brain activity measured using EEG, and lots of of the anticipated pieces were found to be recognizable representations of what the user imagined. By designing a system that enables musicians to create music no matter their physical abilities, I hope this work helps bring a more accessible future for music performance closer to reality.”
Before joining MTC, Southard was initially unaware of the breadth, scope, and magnitude of what this system could offer for further pursuing and realizing her interests. “The MIT Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program taught me a lot about the chances on the intersection of STEM and the humanities,” she says. “After I first began this system, I truthfully wasn’t sure what counted as ‘music technology.’ Through classes, research, and conversations with faculty, guest speakers, and peers, I learned the sphere was far broader and more fascinating than I could have previously imagined.”
She continues, “coming from a background in neuro- and computer science, a lot of my undergraduate projects happened entirely on devices. But this program allowed me to come across more hands-on experiences, from conducting audio recordings to constructing electronic musical instruments from scratch.”
One other MTC graduate, and student speaker on the 2026 SHASS Advanced Degree Ceremony, Mariano Salcedo ’25, SM ’26, presented a custom web application allowing anyone to create unique emergent visuals which can be driven by real-time streaming music. To perform this effect, Salcedo built algorithms that leverage the complex visual behavior of self-organized systems because the means toward an aesthetically synergetic end.
In his Advanced Degree Ceremony oration, Salcedo expressed his gratitude and admiration for the passionate those who he’s met not only in MTC, but at MIT overall. In an appropriately compassionate mode, he empathetically opined, “I believe what times like this call from us is to cleared the path in human and humane-centered technology, which implies we don’t only just ask what we will construct, but we also ask who’s it going to affect, who isn’t going to affect? Who does it profit?”
Music technology thriving at MIT
Associate Professor Anna Huang SM ’08 of MTA and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS, through SCC), a graduate of the MIT Media Lab, and one in all the world’s leading researchers in collaborative human-AI music-making, echoed each Southard and Salcedo’s sentiments through her keynote presentation, “In Search of Resonance in Human-AI Interaction.” A compelling and intimately conversational address, her speech emphasized the importance of centering the human musician in all that is finished regarding AI, while also making efforts to incorporate all musics of the world in its discourse at every opportunity.
With a lot of her members of the family within the audience, Huang reflected, “I actually have the privilege of being in each MIT Music and EECS — an interdisciplinary, shared space. What does it mean to construct music technology on this context? We’re surrounded by extremely talented musicians, so we take this co-design approach: We work with these musicians, we go into the studio, and each week we try something. And the technology grows with the creative process. We’re at all times attempting to push each of those forward, and it’s at all times on the sting. It’s very, very rewarding. It’s where I feel most at home.”
Huang also explained how this practice sets the stage for a brand new Studies in Music Technology subject that she can be co-teaching in the autumn with recently appointed Professor of Theater Arts Grisha Coleman. Class 21M.369/569 (Tuning Attention: Creative Practices in Movement, Sound, and AI) proposes that the study of sound and movement practices can inform how we construct and envision computational systems, focusing particularly on our relationship to AIs. It’ll introduce students to a spread of musical practices in improvisation and somatics by means of motion-capture technologies, critical interaction design, generative modeling, and algorithms for interpretability and learning through human feedback.
All considered, the longer term of the MIT Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program is vivid. Egozy says MTC admitted 10 master’s students for the 2026-27 academic 12 months from over 100 applicants. Unlike this 12 months’s class, next 12 months’s students is not going to only include recent MIT undergraduate alumni, but additionally recent faces to campus.
“Widening the pool to graduates of other schools and institutions will bring a unprecedented wealth of perspectives and experiences to this system. Moreover, all three shared faculty between MTA and EECS — including Mark Rau, Paris Smaragdis SM ’97, PhD ’01, and Huang — are inviting recent Music Technology PhD students to their labs by means of EECS,” Egozy says.
Embodying its mission, MTC is proving to be a vibrant, multidisciplinary program that pulls many kinds of scholars with quite a lot of profession objectives from wide-ranging backgrounds.
“Despite their diversity, our students all possess a central commonality,” Egozy says, “not only a shared love for music, but additionally a deep desire to enhance that zeal by means of technology in a really warmhearted, humanitarian way.”
List of projects
Rachel Loh, Quanta Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Visualizing the Internal State of Music Models for Live Human-AI Improvisation”
Noble Harasha, Quanta Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Modeling Subjectivity and Collective Sensory Perception as Noisy, Analog Communication in Feedback-Driven Networks”
Z Chen, Quanta Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Generative Music as a Catalyst for Social Choreography”
Nithya Shikarpur: “The Moving Drone: A Live Improvisation within the Context of Hindustani Music with the Human Voice, Generative models, and Loops”
Mariano Salcedo, Alex Rigopulos (1992) Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Neural Cellular Automata for Interactive Music Visualization”
Claire Southard, John Piscitello Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Neural Decoding of Imagined Music”
Stephen Brade, Suwan Kim, Valerie Chen: “Whale, Cello (there?): A Musical Dialog between Cello and a Real-time Diffusion Model Trained on Whale Songs”