EP/20: FLUID MUSIC
Mutating Music with MIT Media Lab’s Charles Holbrow
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In this episode we speak with music of the future researcher Charles Holbrow. When we spoke with him, he was on the brink of earning his PhD from the Opera of the Future group within the famed MIT Media Lab.
We talk to Charles about the fact that while new styles and new technologies are constantly emerging, recorded music itself has not fundamentally changed. We dig into the concept of adaptive or interactive music - music that changes itself as we listen to it, triggered by the events in the environment or listener behaviour. We discuss how a more fluid approach to music recording would impact both the creator and the listener. We also get his take on computer-generated music, exploring the topic of whether a machine will ever have the capacity to create a masterpiece.
Follow his work at: media.mit.edu/people/holbrow/overview/ and follow him on Twitter: @charlesholbrow
About Charles
Charles Holbrow is a PhD Candidate with the Opera of the Future group within the MIT Media Lab. Before joining the lab, he worked as audio engineer and as a software engineer, developing audio technology for musical video games, and for spectacular theatrical performances.
He is interested in how music can use the internet as more than just a distribution medium, and how new kinds of music and media can take advantage of the power of the internet.
Charles is the recipient of the Joan K. Rossi Memorial Music Scholarship, and the Audio Engineering Society Educational Foundation Grant, as well as First Place winner of the Audio Engineering Society Undergraduate Design Competition.
His publications have appeared in journals as diverse as The Journal of Biomedical Optics, New Interfaces for Musical Expression, and The Physics Teacher. He has a Bachelor of Music in Sound Recording Technology, and a Master’s Degree from the Media Lab. Charles is also an alumnus of the Hack Reactor software development school in San Francisco, and the Recurse Center in NYC.
