MIT Music Tech Speaker Series Presents: Andrew McPherson

This is a talk about designing musical instruments and the delicate interplay of artistic and technical ways of thinking. All instruments, and especially digital ones, entail a balance between design and analysis, with instruments relying on symbolic or numerical models of music in order to create it, as exemplified in the venerable MIDI standard. However, no system is ever devoid of sociocultural context, and even the simplest technologies when examined in situ can exhibit fascinating complexity.

This talk will begin with a stubbornly contrarian take on some seemingly obvious premises of musical ontology. Physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad writes that, "language has been granted too much power." I would like to propose that as designers and researchers, we can let words about music take precedence over the messy and open-ended experience of making music, and that becoming overly preoccupied with language risks propagating clichés and reinforcing cultural stereotypes. Drawing on recent scholarship in human-computer interaction, and science and technology studies, I will recount some alternative approaches and possible futures for designing music technology when technical and cultural factors are inextricably entangled. I will illustrate these ideas with recent projects from the Augmented Instruments Laboratory, with a focus on rich bidirectional couplings between digital and analog electronics, acoustics, and human creative experience.

Speaker Bio:

Andrew McPherson (https://andrewmcpherson.org) is Professor of Design Engineering and Music at Imperial College London, where he leads the Augmented Instruments Laboratory (https://instrumentslab.org), a research team creating new musical instruments, studying the encounters between musicians and instruments, and developing high-performance technologies for real-time interactive audio. Andrew received undergraduate degrees in music and electrical engineering from MIT in 2004-05, completing an MEng thesis in the MIT Media Lab and subsequently completing a PhD in music composition at the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Drexel University, he joined the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London in 2011, moving to Imperial in 2023.

Andrew has a particular interest in hybrid acoustic-electronic instruments; his magnetic resonator piano, an electromagnetically-augmented grand piano, has been used in dozens of compositions and featured in TV, film scores and several albums. He is also a co-founder of Bela.io, a startup making high-performance open-source embedded audio computing systems. Andrew currently holds an ERC/UKRI Consolidator Grant ("RUDIMENTS") exploring the cultural implications of engineering decisions in music technology, as well as a recently completed fellowship from the UK Royal Academy of Engineering in embedded music computing.