People don't always understand Tod Machover's musical technology -audiences in Japan thought his 'sonic glove' masked an amputated hand. But he's only using technology to forget about it, he tells Arminta Wallace, and his Toy Symphony is all about bringing children to the heart of music.
Thirty seconds into a live videolink interview with the composer Tod Machover, I encounter the unacceptable face of technology: my own. On the other side of the Atlantic, Machover is as relaxed and casual as if he were chatting to somebody on the sofa beside him. Three feet away, an enormous blow-up of yours truly stares sweatily into cyberspace. It is not, to put it mildly, a pretty sight.
Luckily, the project which has brought me to Media Lab Europe's beautifully restored building at the Guinness Hop Store in Dublin's Liberties represents the other side of the hi-tech coin. Like some kind of musical wizard, Machover's Toy Symphony aims to sweep children up and place them in the heart of the musical experience; magically, they find themselves collaborating with the National Symphony Orchestra and superstar violinist Joshua Bell, performing both pre-composed music and a piece they have written themselves.
This is where the technology comes in. Machover and his hi-tech team at the MIT Media Lab in Boston have designed special "hyper-instruments" which eliminate years of scales, sol-fa and struggles with fingering. For the past six months, under the supervision of music education specialist Kevin Jennings and in conjunction with the Ark Cultural Centre, Irish children have been exploring the possibilities of these instruments, preparing for the world première on April 9th - and having a musical ball.
Up on the video screen, an animated Machover is explaining how it came about. "It seems like a real paradox," he says, "that there's more and more music around us all the time, whether in elevators or while you're eating or driving - I was in Houston (Texas) recently and they pipe in music through the streets in downtown, so the whole city is sonorised, which is kind of bizarre - yet I definitely get the feeling that the more music is around us, the more music is devalued. The more music is in the environment, the less carefully we listen to it."
At the same time, fewer and fewer people are learning to play instruments. "When I started to look for music classes for my eldest daughter I realised how difficult it is to find wonderful experiences in music to start kids off with," says Machover, whose first teacher at home in New York - his mother - used to encourage her pupils to make instruments from all sorts of bits and pieces around the house. "Early music education tends to be very conservative, using folk melodies and 'classical' rhythms. Contrast that with pre-school and its tables laid out with different things to touch, glue and paste. You don't have something you have to imitate, but a set of materials organised in such a way that it leads you to explore them - and there's an enormous amount of freedom for the kids to decide what they want to do."
Enter Beatbugs, eight networked percussive instruments which reproduce rhythmic patterns and transform their pitch and timbre, and Shapers, colourful balls which, when squeezed, play formulas of notes with synthesiser sounds.
Then there's Hyperscore, a sophisticated piece of software which allows children to draw a piece of music on-screen, then develop, modulate and harmonise it. It may feel like play, but unlike conventional music lessons - which often get hung up on the visual barrier of a row of notes on a page - it's designed to encourage children to listen carefully and critically to the sounds they produce.
It's also focused very strongly on the end product: next week's concert with the NSO and Joshua Bell, conducted by Gerhard Markson. Besides Toy Symphony itself, the programme will feature Machover's Sparkler, for orchestra and interactive computer electronics; Gil Weinberg's Nerve, for six children and two Beatbug percussionists; Jean-Pascal Beintus's Nature Suite for orchestra; four children on Shapers, a composition for string orchestra written with Hyperscore; and a "hyperviolin" transcription of Paganini's Caprice No 24, played by Joshua Bell.
Sounds eclectic? Not by Machover's standards. His musical oeuvre ranges from Flora, a five-minute piece for computer-generated tape based on the texture and emotion of the soprano voice, to Valis, an operatic setting of the sci-fi novel by Philip K. Dick.
The 1996 première of his Brain Opera - a sort of DIY digital wonderland in which the audience entered a "mind forest" and played with a "melody easel" and a "sensor chair" - incorporated an "Internet solo" with live feedback from a real-time Web audience. The result, according to one reviewer, was "a Charles Ives-ish pastiche with recognisable dashes of The Beatles, Stravinsky and Monk". Outlandish stuff for a composer who studied at the Juilliard School with Elliott Carter, then worked with Pierre Boulez in Paris; but Machover's musical tastes range from Schoenberg to rock via jazz and blues.
"I started as a classical musician with relatively little interest in popular music," he says. "I'm a cellist, so I grew up playing chamber music. But my parents were both very interested in experimental music, so besides the traditional classical repertoire I went to a lot of concerts by John Cage and people like that. Then the Sergeant Pepper album came out. I was just at the right age, and I went crazy over it - and that was the first big fight I had with my mom, because she really didn't get that at all." At high school, he started a rock band - complete with cello. "I put headphones around the side of it to amplify it." The experiment was to lead, after years of research, to the invention of the "hypercello", a digitally-enhanced instrument which has, to date, been played mostly by Yo-Yo Ma.
The technology behind Machover's musical experimentation is often well beyond the grasp of most ordinary mortals. Even the tech-mad Japanese were puzzled by his "data-glove", a futuristic steel-and-leather construct designed to translate gestures directly into sound. Many in the audience at a 1990 performance of Bug-Mudra in Tokyo were under the impression that the conductor had, in some sort of tragic accident, lost his left hand. But as he explains, courtesy of the videolink, he's using technology in order to forget about technology. This is not jazzed-up classics or gimmicky gadgetry but an attempt to explore ways in which our musical sensibilities might be expanded, rather than dulled, in the digital age.
"Some people have talked about my music as being a little bit like white-water rafting," says Machover. "There's always something at the centre of the music that everybody can relate to immediately. Often it's a melody, sometimes it's a bass line. Something to draw you through the piece. And then - like being on a raft in white water - there's usually quite a lot of other activity going on at the same time. So part of the challenge is to hold on to the raft."
If you'd like to get close to the Toy Symphony technology, there's an open house at the National Concert Hall on Tuesday, April 9th from 4.30 p.m. to 6 p.m. The performance itself is scheduled to begin at 6.30 p.m. Today at the Ark, Temple Bar, there is an open day and workshops as part of its month-long MusicFest. The festival will continue throughout April with events in a variety of musical styles, from jazz/trad fusion and Paddington Bear's First Concert to a wind quintet. For information: 01-6707788 /www.ark.ie
