Technology enables people with severe physical and mental disabilities to communicate and enjoy a more enriching life.
By Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times Music Critic
January 22, 2012
There is a great deal of music in the world, and no one knows exactly why. But it does have its ready uses. The music business can make you rich and famous. The pianist Christopher O'Riley admitted in The Times last week what a lot of classical musicians won't: He learned the piano, at least in part, to attract the attention of girls.
As I write this, a sparkling new recording of Tod Machover's "Sparkler," an infectious overture for orchestra and live electronics, is playing on my stereo and making itself useful. The CD, "but not simpler…," is drowning out trucks on a nearby home construction site whose backup beeps are loud enough to wake the dead a mile away. "Sparkler" is more effectively fueling my fingers as I type than was my morning double cappuccino. The music is lifting my spirits and making writing almost fun. Even so, I'm not getting the greatest, if least explicable, pleasure "Sparkler" can provide. That's obtained by giving the score undivided attention.
Machover, an intriguing futurologist as well as an inventive composer, runs the departments in hyper-instruments (acoustical instruments given spiffy electronic features) and opera of the future at MIT's ultra-high-tech Media Lab. Last week, he was at UC Santa Barbara to speak on "Music, Mind and Health: Diagnosis, Treatment, and Well-being through Active Sound," one of four lectures he's given recently at the university's Sage Center for the Study of the Mind.
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