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I'd studied piano first and switched over to cello when I was about seven. I played mostly chamber and solo classical music. I got really involved with rock music when I was a teenager. I wired up my cello.

Tod Machover

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Tod Machover
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: November 24
Composer
Music Pedagogue
Pianist
Mount Vernon
New York
Seven
Chamber
Rock
Classical
Rocks
Studied
Involved
Solo
Music
Teenager
Firsts
Mostly
Cello
First
Piano
Switched
Really
Played
Wired

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I almost never these days sit down with a CD or my laptop and just listen to a piece with a score. I probably would do that while I'm exercising.
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One of my interests in music has always been what it means, why it affects us the way it does.
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The Beatles realized that what they were making in the studio could never be performed. And they had already given up on performing because there were too many screaming fans and they were playing in larger and larger venues so they couldn't even hear what they were playing, it just wasn't any fun any more.
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The one obvious thing is that the devices are so good now that you can also see their limitations extremely well.
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I think from age 13, 14, 15, I thought, yes, this rich studio produced music is the future, but it can't be the future to go run away into the recording studio. How can we take that kind of complexity and richness and make it possible for people to touch it and play it live. That's what hyperinstruments are.
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Music seems to stimulate more parts of our mind than almost every other activity. It combines more parts of our minds. It synchronizes our minds. It allows people in groups to do a non-verbal immediate activity together.
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I went to the University of California, Santa Cruz for a year, which turned out to be a really vibrant, very intensive intellectual atmosphere where you could do a lot of aspect of music without it being a conservatory. And that's why I went there.
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One of the big mysteries of music is, if you take music without words, it means something to us because we know it's about something. It's about something important humanly, but since there are no words, nobody knows what it's about.
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I've done a lot of operas. I've probably done more different kind of operas than anybody.
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I never liked opera growing up. I always liked chamber music or solo music even more than orchestral music.
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My work on hyper instruments started with simple instruments, like the piano.
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All the music we know that's popular is actually commonly shared music that takes things that are similar about all of us.
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The English learned, in my view, how to use harmony much earlier than the French or the Italians, or the Germans.
Tod Machover
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I started thinking, my gosh, all this sophisticated software for measuring how Yo-Yo plays, and how he moves and this technique of the bow, I should be able to use similar techniques for measuring the way anybody moves, and so somebody who is not a professional or a trained musician, I should be able to make a musical environment for them.
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Any Beatles song is perfect. It gets to you right away.
Tod Machover
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I had grown up and gone to high school in New York, so I wanted to get out of the east coast.
Tod Machover
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I love the cello, I love the physical sense of an instrument that's about the size of your body that vibrates enough that even if you play an open string, you feel it.
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My message is to forget about dichotomies. The Brain Opera is an opera, even if it does not tell a story in the usual way. It is a psychological journey with voices - so I do consider it an opera.
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The barn where I work, it's only 15 minutes or so from Harvard square, so It's very close to the center of Boston, but it happens to be a total oasis. It's completely quiet in there.
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Nobody talks about music as having intrinsic meaning, how it engages the mind.
Tod Machover