The MIT Music Technology and Computing (MTC) Graduate Program. — launched in fall 2024 as part of a collaboration between Section of Music and Theater Art In School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (SHASS) i Engineering School (SoE) – On May 13, MIT presented its inaugural Music Technology Research Showcase. The event took place in the Thomas Tull Concert Hall in the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building and featured diverse and captivating research presentations and musical performances.
The ceremonial occasion was attended by the first five MTC participants (all of whom were previously MIT students), as well as several graduate students and faculty. Each scholar presented inspiring examples of inventive engineering that reflected the broader and growing music technology scene at MIT.
The 90-minute event showcased a wide range of research projects, including real-time visualization of what an AI co-improvising agent would play on the piano; sound and art installation based on cacophonous network communication; a hip-hop dance club in which music is created from dance; and using electroencephalogram (EEG) signals to identify the musical melodies our brains imagine.
“A new space of exploration and insights”
The presentation, a combination of a technical presentation and a live performance, began with remarks from SHASS Dean and Professor of Philosophy Agustín Rayo, SOE Dean and Professor of Chemical Engineering Paula Hammond, and MTC Director and Professor of Musical Practice Eran Egozy.
Rayo began, “The goal of this program is simple – for MIT to lead the world in the theory and application of music technology,” adding, “it’s not just about making music with technology; it’s also about working across disciplines to help better shape the future of expression in an AI-powered world, all while reflecting MIT at its best.”
Rayo noted that the graduate program was made possible in part by the opening of the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building in 2025, which added fresh classrooms, studios, rehearsal spaces and a dedicated music technology laboratory. He also thanked the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing for its support of the graduate program.
Hammond continued: “As those in this room already know, music and engineering have some common roots. Both are based on mathematical precision and draw on specific structures, rhythms, and frequencies. Both require hard work and technical knowledge combined with inspiration and imagination to create something completely new. Given these parallels, it is no surprise that so many of MIT’s faculty, students, and staff are also accomplished musicians and artists.”
She continued, “Our music program is a gem. Only at MIT have we been able to bring together the best technologists and the best musicians to create unique opportunities for collaboration. Here we have brought together faculty and students who identify strongly with both music and engineering to create a new space of exploration and insight. This is a powerful example of the collaborative culture that defines the Institute.”
Egozy called the event “a harmonious hybrid of a concert and a symposium” and recalls, “it’s a bit astonishing what our students have accomplished in just one short and fast year. While we initially debated the trade-offs between a one-year and two-year graduate program, I think this cohort has really shown us that we can make huge strides in our learning and research skills in a concentrated period of time.”
Student research on display
One such student is Claire Southard ’25, SM ’26, who developed a machine learning model to identify notes hidden in EEG signals.
Southard explains: “Every year, musicians are diagnosed with movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and dystonia, or experience injuries that prevent them from controlling their hands and bodies in the way needed to play their instruments. Because of this, too many musicians are forced to stop doing what they love. In my work, I am exploring one strategy to help such musicians perform again by translating the music they are trying to play directly into their brain activity – completely bypassing the need for motor control. To this end, I have trained learning models machine to predict what music a person imagines based on brain activity measured by EEG, and many of the predicted songs turned out to be recognizable representations of the user’s imagination. By designing a system that allows musicians to create music regardless of their physical abilities, I hope this work will help bring reality closer to a more accessible future of music performance.
Before joining MTC, Southard was initially unaware of the breadth, scope and magnitude of what the program could offer to further develop and pursue her interests. “MIT’s music technology and computing graduate program taught me a lot about the possibilities at the intersection of STEM and the arts,” he says. “When I first started the program, I honestly wasn’t sure what counted as ‘music technology.’ Through classes, research, and conversations with faculty, guest speakers, and colleagues, I learned that this field is much broader and more fascinating than I could have previously imagined.”
He continues, “Coming from a neuro-computer science background, many of my undergraduate projects were completed entirely on devices. However, this program allowed me to gain more hands-on experience, from conducting audio recordings to building electronic musical instruments from scratch.”
Fellow MTC alumnus and 2026 SHASS Graduate Ceremony speaker, Mariano Salcedo ’25, SM ’26, demonstrated a custom web application that allows anyone to create unique, emergent visual effects powered by real-time music streaming. To achieve this effect, Salcedo has built algorithms that leverage the complex visual behavior of self-organizing systems as a means to achieve an aesthetically synergistic goal.
In his graduation speech, Salcedo expressed his gratitude and admiration for the passionate people he met not only at MTC, but at MIT in general. In an appropriately compassionate way, he expressed his empathetic opinion: “I think in times like this, the call from us is to be a leader in human-centered technology, which means that we not only ask what we can build, but we also ask who will be impacted and who will not be affected? Who will benefit from it?”
Music technology thrives at MIT
Associate Professor Anna Huang SM ’08 MTA and the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS, to SCC), graduate of the Faculty MIT Media Laband one of the world’s leading researchers on collaborative human-AI music-making, echoed Southard and Salcedo’s views in her keynote presentation titled “In Search of Resonance in Human-AI Interaction.” Her speech was fascinating and intimately conversational. Her speech emphasized the importance of centering the human musician in everything that happens with artificial intelligence, while making efforts to include all the music in the world in the discourse at every opportunity.
Huang reflected that many of her family members were in the audience: “I have the honor of working at both MIT Music and EECS – in an interdisciplinary, shared space. What does it mean to build music technology in this context? We are surrounded by incredibly talented musicians, so we take a co-design approach: we collaborate with these musicians, go into the studio and try something every week. And the technology grows with the artistic process. We are always trying to push both of these things forward, and it is always on on the edge. This is the place where I feel most at home.
Huang also explained how this internship sets the stage for a fresh music technology major, which she will co-taught in the fall with recently appointed theater arts professor Grisha Coleman. Class 21M.369/569 (Tuning Attention: Inventive Practices in Motion, Sound, and Artificial Intelligence) proposes that the study of sound and motion practices can inform how we build and imagine computational systems, focusing particularly on our relationship with artificial intelligence. It will introduce students to a range of improvisational and somatic musical practices using motion capture technologies, critical interaction design, generative modeling, and interpretation and learning algorithms through human feedback.
Overall, the future is glowing for MIT’s music technology and computing graduate program. Egozy says MTC has admitted 10 master’s students out of more than 100 applicants for the 2026-2027 academic year. Unlike this year’s class, next year’s students will include not only recent MIT undergraduate graduates, but also fresh faces on campus.
“Expanding the pool to include graduates from other schools and institutions will bring an extraordinary wealth of perspectives and experiences to the program. Additionally, all three faculty members shared by MTA and EECS—including Mark Rau, Paris Smaragdis SM ’97, PhD ’01, and Huang—invite new graduate students in music technology to their labs within EECS,” says Egozy.
In fulfilling its mission, MTC proves to be a lively, multidisciplinary program that attracts many students from diverse backgrounds with a variety of career goals.
“Despite their diversity, all of our students have one thing in common,” says Egozy, “not only a shared love of music, but also a deep desire to pursue this passion through technology in a very warm and humane way.”
Project list
Rachel Loh, Quanta Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Visualizing the Internal State of Musical Models for Live Human Improvisation and Artificial Intelligence”
Noble Harasha, Quanta specialist in music technology and computing: “Modeling subjectivity and collective sensory perception as noise, analog communication in feedback-based networks”
Z Chen, Quanta Specialist in Music Technology and Computation: Generative Music as a Catalyst for Social Choreography”
Nithya Shikarpur: “Moving Drone: Live Improvisation in the Context of Hindustani Music Using the Human Voice, Generative Models and Loops”
Mariano Salcedo, Alex Rigopulos (1992) Fellow in Music Technology and Computing: “Neural Cellular Automata for Interactive Music Visualization”
Claire Southard, John Piscitello Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Neural Decoding of Imaginary Music”
Stephen Brade, Suwan Kim, Valerie Chen: “Whale, Cello (there?): A musical dialogue between the cello and a real-time diffusion model trained on whale songs”