Tod Machover Quotes

Strangely, the thing I listen to 75% of the time, when I'm exercising with my headphones on is English Tudor/Elizabethan music, so music from about 1450 to the early 1600's.

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.

My work on hyper instruments started with simple instruments, like the piano.

The one obvious thing is that the devices are so good now that you can also see their limitations extremely well.

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.

Why does every society seem to want to make music when it often seems like kind of a frill.

I had grown up and gone to high school in New York, so I wanted to get out of the east coast.

All the music we know that's popular is actually commonly shared music that takes things that are similar about all of us.

I listen to a lot of music that teenagers are listening to because I'm around them.

The English learned, in my view, how to use harmony much earlier than the French or the Italians, or the Germans.

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.

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.

One of the things I like most of all is being in my study, in my barn, with absolutely no sound anywhere thinking about something. It's extremely important to me.

One of my interests in music has always been what it means, why it affects us the way it does.

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.

I think a double bass for me would be too much effort. But the cello, you're really engaged and the sound is kind of right here. So, it feels like being merged, married to an instrument.

I've done a lot of operas. I've probably done more different kind of operas than anybody.

I never liked opera growing up. I always liked chamber music or solo music even more than orchestral music.

I love working with technology because it allows me to follow my imagination and to invent new things.

I think in many ways, the texture of technology actually diminishes human beings. It doesn't augment them.

That's the definition of popularity. Something that literally resonates with many, many people.

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.

You have to train your mind and your ears, but they're more like athletic skills. So, part of music you just have to learn those things or you can't practice the art.

After a year, I thought gee I don't really need college anymore, which wasn't correct, but that's what I thought.

Any Beatles song is perfect. It gets to you right away.

There were a lot of things happen in the mid-'80's that all of a sudden made it possible to do a lot of very quick interactive music.

I did take composition lessons when I was in high school, so I wrote piano pieces. I wrote some chamber music. I don't think any of that was particularly interesting.

There's just an incredibly rich and interesting relationship between our listening to music and the way our minds engage.

There's many reason music exists and we are beginning to no only understand that, but measure that.

Works of art should be stimulating. They should wake people up rather than acting like a sedative.

Nobody talks about music as having intrinsic meaning, how it engages the mind.