Composer Tod Machover believes that anyone can make music, and the Brain Opera -- created by him with a team of over fifty artists and scientists at the M.I.T. Media Lab -- seeks to demonstrate this in a wholly new and original way, drawing audiences into the mysteries of how sensory perception, musical structure, language, and emotion interplay. The Brain Opera is a one-of-a-kind, interactive musical event which will debut at the first Lincoln Center Festival in New York City from July 23 to August 3, 1996. Afterwards, it will tour worldwide to numerous places, including the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria, the NexOpera Festival in Tokyo, Singapore, and the Electronic Cafe International in Copenhagen.
The Brain Opera is a three-part work which is structured to incorporate the musical contributions of both on-line and live audiences. These parts include Mind Forest, Brain Opera Performance, and Net Music.
Mind Forest
When the audience enters the hall, they first encounter a lobby which is filled with a large installation called the "Mind Forest." The Mind Forest is a complex space filled with hands-on experiences that turn body gesture and voice input into music and images. The space, designed by architect Ray Kinoshita, is intended to create the impression of walking, figuratively, into a giant musical brain. Organic shapes and materials designed by Maggie Orth, and responsive, invisible sensors invented by Joe Paradiso and his team, help make the environment feel natural and responsive rather than hi-tech and mechanical. There are five different types of interactive experiences, with multiple copies of each, which can be explored in any order.
Brain Opera Performance
The culmination of the Brain Opera experience is the 45-minute Final Performance. Here, a three-movement composition ties together the project's many musical, visual, and textual strands into a unified tapestry. Three performers shape, select, and interpret precomposed and audience-created elements, using specially-designed hyperinstruments(link here to the Hyperinstruments page).
Net Music
Numerous on-line activities exist for people to remotely interact with the Brain Opera. These include web versions of hyperinstruments (implemented as Java applets) for people to play from home, submissions of images and audio samples, live internet broadcasts of the New York performances, and a limited number of opportunities for people to log on directly to the live performances and remotely perform in the Brain Opera.
Further Information
For further written material on the Brain Opera project, please email Jacqueline Karaaslanian at jk@media.mit.edu. For press and media information, please contact Dan Fleshler at 212-554-4260, or 75212.631@compuserve.com
