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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.

Tod Machover

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Tod Machover
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: November 24
Composer
Music Pedagogue
Pianist
Mount Vernon
New York
Bigs
Means
Music
Humanly
Without
Mysteries
Take
Mystery
Mean
Nobody
Important
Since
Something
Words

More quotes by Tod Machover

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One of my interests in music has always been what it means, why it affects us the way it does.
Tod Machover
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I love Bach, I love Beethoven, I love Mozart, I love the Beatles, I love you know, Stockhausen, I love many things. But for some reason I come back to Elizabethan music because it's a little bit like the Beatles.
Tod Machover
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Any Beatles song is perfect. It gets to you right away.
Tod Machover
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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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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.
Tod Machover
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Nobody talks about music as having intrinsic meaning, how it engages the mind.
Tod Machover
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I have a big barn that I converted to my music studio, so I go there early in the morning and the first thing I do is rowing. And that's when I listen to a lot of music.
Tod Machover
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I think in many ways, the texture of technology actually diminishes human beings. It doesn't augment them.
Tod Machover
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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.
Tod Machover
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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.
Tod Machover
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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.
Tod Machover
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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.
Tod Machover
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I never liked opera growing up. I always liked chamber music or solo music even more than orchestral music.
Tod Machover
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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.
Tod Machover
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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.
Tod Machover
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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.
Tod Machover
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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've done a lot of operas. I've probably done more different kind of operas than anybody.
Tod Machover
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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.
Tod Machover
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I like the idea of imagining a sound and feeling a sound and then having it come out through your body, through an instrument. That's an important way to make music.
Tod Machover