The MIT Music Technology and Computation (MTC) Graduate Program — launching in 2024 as a collaboration between the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (SHASS) and the Music and Theater Arts section in the School of Engineering (SOE) — presented its inaugural MIT Music Technology Research Showcase on May 13. The program played to a standing-room-only house in the Thomas Tull Concert Hall of the Edward and Joyce Lynde Music Building and presented diverse and captivating recitals. Presentations and musical performances.
The first five MTC nominees (all of whom were former MIT graduates) were present at the celebration, along with several PhD students and faculty. Each scholar presented inspiring examples of artistic engineering that reflect the broad and emerging music technology landscape at MIT.
The 90-minute program featured a wide range of research projects, including a real-time visualization of what an AI co-improvement agent is about to play on a piano; A sound-art installation based on noise network communications; A hip-hop dance troupe where dance creates music; And electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are used to identify the musical melodies our brain is imagining.
“A new space for exploration and insight”
Interweaving technical presentation with live performance, the showcase opened with remarks from SHASS Dean and Professor of Philosophy Agustin Rayo, SOE Dean and Professor of Chemical Engineering Paula Hammond, and MTC Director and Professor of Music Practice Aaron Egozi.
“The goal of this program is simple – for MIT to lead the world in music technology theory and application,” Rayo began, adding that “it’s not just about making music with technology; it’s also about working across a variety of disciplines to help better shape the future of expression in an AI-driven world, all while also reflecting MIT at its best.”
Rayo said the graduate program was made possible in part by the opening of the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building in 2025, which provided new classrooms, studios, rehearsal space and a dedicated music technology laboratory. He also credited the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing for support for the graduate program.
Hammond followed: “As those in this room already know, music and engineering have somewhat similar roots. Both rely on mathematical precision and are informed by defined structures, rhythms, and frequencies. Both require hard work and technical know-how combined with inspiration and imagination to create something entirely new. Given those similarities, it is no surprise that so many faculty, students, and staff members at MIT are also accomplished musicians and artists.”
He added, “Our music program is a gem. Only at MIT can we bring together top technologists and top 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 for exploration and insight. It is a strong example of the collaborative culture that defines the institute.”
Egozi called the program a “harmonious blend of concert and seminar” and recalled, “It’s a bit astonishing to see what our students have accomplished in just one short and fast-paced year. While we originally debated the trade-off between a one-year and two-year master’s program, I think this group really showed us that we can make huge strides in learning and research capabilities in a concentrated period of time.”
student research on performance
One of those students is Claire Southard ’25, SM ’26, who developed a machine-learning model used to identify musical notes hidden in EEG signals.
Southard explains, “Each 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 ways necessary to play their instruments. Because of this, too many musicians are forced to stop doing what they love. My work explores a strategy to help such musicians perform again by translating music directly from their brain activity. – bypasses the need for motor control altogether. To do this, I trained a machine-learning model to predict whether a person would imagine music from their brain activity, measured using EEG, and found many of the predicted pieces to be recognizable representations of what the user had imagined, allowing musicians to create music regardless of their physical abilities. I hope this work will help bring a more accessible future for music performance closer to reality. Will help.
Before joining MTC, Southard was initially unaware of what the program could offer to pursue and realize her interests. “The MIT Music Technology and Computation graduate program taught me a lot about the possibilities between STEM and the arts,” she says. “When I first started the program, I honestly wasn’t sure what counted as ‘music technology.’ Through classes, coursework, and conversations with faculty, guest speakers, and fellows, I learned that this field is much more broad and fascinating than I first thought.
She adds, “Coming from a neuro- and computer science background, many of my graduate projects took place entirely on devices. But this program allowed me to experience more hands-on experiences, from making audio recordings to building electronic musical instruments.”
Another MTC graduate, and student speaker at the 2026 SHASS Advanced Degree Ceremony, Mariano Salcedo ’25, SM ’26, presented a custom web application that allows anyone to create unique casual scenes that are powered by real-time streaming music. To accomplish this effect, Salcedo created algorithms that take advantage of the complex visual behavior of self-organized systems as a means to an aesthetically synergistic end.
In his advanced degree ceremony speech, Salcedo expressed his gratitude and appreciation for the passionate people he met not only at MTC, but at MIT as a whole. In an appropriately compassionate tone, he said sympathetically, “I think the call on our part in times like these is to lead human and humanity-centered technology, meaning we don’t just ask what can we create, but we also ask who will it impact, who won’t it impact? Who will benefit from it?”
Music technology is thriving at MIT
Anna Huang SM ’08, associate professor of MTA and Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS, via SCC), a graduate of the MIT Media Lab and one of the world’s leading researchers in collaborative human-AI music-making, echoed the sentiments of both Southard and Salcedo through her keynote presentation, “In Search of Resonance in Human-AI Interaction.” In a compelling and deeply interactive address, his speech emphasized the importance of centering the human musician in all AI-related work, while also attempting to include all of the world’s music in his discourse at every opportunity.
Huang said, with several members of his family in the audience, “I have the privilege of being at both MIT Music and EECS—an interdisciplinary, shared space. What does it mean to build music technology in this context? We’re surrounded by extremely talented musicians, so we take this co-design approach: We work with these musicians, we go into the studio, and every week we try something. And the technology grows with the creative process. We’re always Trying to push both of these forward, it’s very rewarding, it’s where I feel at home.
Huang also described how this practice sets the stage for a new study in music technology that she will co-teach in the fall with recently appointed Theater Arts professor Grisha Coleman. Class 21M.369/569 (Tuning Attention: Creative Practices in Motion, Sound and AI) proposes that the study of sound and motion practices can inform how we build and imagine computational systems, focusing specifically on their relationship with AI. It will introduce students to a range of musical practices in improvisation and somatics, through motion-capture technologies, critical interaction design, generative modeling and algorithms for interpretation and learning through human response.
Overall, the future is bright for the MIT Music Technology and Computation graduate program. Egozi says MTC admitted 10 master’s students from more than 100 applicants for the 2026-27 academic year. Unlike this year’s class, next year’s students will include not only recent MIT graduate alumni, but also newcomers to campus.
“Expanding the pool to graduates from other schools and institutions will bring extraordinary perspectives and experiences to the program. Additionally, all three shared faculty between MTA and EECS – including Mark Rau, Paris Smaragdis SM ’97, PhD ’01, and Huang – are inviting new music technology PhD students through EECS to their laboratories,” says Agozzi.
Embodying its mission, MTC is proving to be a vibrant, multidisciplinary program that attracts a wide variety of students with different career objectives from a wide range of backgrounds.
“Despite their diversity, all of our students have one central similarity,” Egozi says, “not only a shared love for music, but also a deep desire to enhance that passion through technology in a very cordial, humane way.”
list of projects
Rachel Loh, Quanta Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Visualizing the Internal State of Music Models for Live Human-AI Improvisation”
Noble Harshaw, Quanta Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Modeling subjectivity and collective sensory perception as noise, analog communication in feedback-driven networks”
Z Chen, Quanta Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Creative music as a catalyst for social choreography”
Nitya Shikarpur: “The Moving Drone: A Live Improvisation in the Context of Hindustani Music with the Human Voice, Generative Models, and Loops”
Mariano Salcedo, Alex Rigopulos (1992) Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Neural Cellular Automata for Interactive Music Visualization”
Claire Southard, John Piscitello Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Neural Decoding of Imagined Music”
Stephen Bradt, Suwan Kim, Valerie Chen: “Whale, cello (there?): A musical dialogue between cello and a real-time propagation model trained on whale songs”
