MIT's new Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program is moving quickly from concept to public demonstration. At its inaugural MIT Music Technology Research Showcase on May 13, students and faculty presented research that treated music technology not as a narrow technical specialty, but as a place where performance, engineering, AI and human creativity meet.
The event took place in the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building's Thomas Tull Concert Hall and drew a standing room-only audience. Across 90 minutes, the program combined research talks with live performance, giving the audience a practical view of what the program's first students have been building.
A New Graduate Program Finds Its Public Stage
The MIT Music Technology and Computation (MTC) Graduate Program launched in fall 2024 as a collaboration between the Music and Theater Arts Section in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), and the School of Engineering (SoE). Its first showcase brought together MTC's first five enrollees, all of whom had previously been MIT undergraduates, along with PhD students and faculty.
The setting mattered. SHASS Dean and professor of philosophy Agustín Rayo said the graduate program was made possible in part by the opening of the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building in 2025. The building added classrooms, studios, rehearsal spaces and a dedicated music technology lab. Rayo also credited the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing for supporting the graduate program.
Rayo described the ambition directly: "The goal of this program is simple — for MIT to lead the world in music technology theory and application." He added that the work is "not just about making music with technology" but also about shaping expression in an AI-driven world through cross-disciplinary work.
Music, Engineering and AI Share the Same Room
The showcase made the program's central argument visible: music technology is not only software, hardware or performance. It can be all three at once. SoE Dean and professor of chemical engineering Paula Hammond framed the overlap by pointing to the shared foundations of music and engineering, including structure, rhythm, frequency, technical skill and imagination.
Hammond called MIT's music program "a gem" and described the program as a space where technologists and musicians can collaborate. Her remarks positioned MTC as an example of MIT's broader collaborative culture, with faculty and students who identify strongly with both music and engineering working in the same environment.
MTC Director and professor of the practice of music Eran Egozy called the event a "harmonious hybrid of concert and symposium." He also noted how much the students had accomplished within a short period, saying the cohort showed that major progress in learning and research can happen in a concentrated timeframe.
What the Students Built
The projects on display covered a wide range of questions about how people might create, hear, see and perform music in the future. The showcase included a real-time visualization of what an AI co-improvising agent is about to play on a piano, a sound-art installation based on noisy network communication, a hip-hop dance circle where movement generates music, and work using electroencephalogram (EEG) signals to identify tunes imagined by the brain.
Claire Southard '25, SM '26 developed a machine-learning model designed to find musical notes within EEG signals. Her work focuses on a direct and practical problem: some musicians lose the physical control needed to play their instruments because of movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease and dystonia, or because of injuries.
Southard's research explores whether music a person is imagining can be predicted from brain activity measured using EEG. She said many predicted pieces were recognizable representations of what the user imagined. The goal is not merely technical novelty; it is a more accessible future for music performance by creating a path around the need for motor control.
Southard also described how the MTC program expanded her sense of the field. Coming from neuro- and computer science, she had worked on many undergraduate projects that happened entirely on devices. In the graduate program, she encountered more hands-on experiences, including audio recording and building electronic musical instruments from scratch.
Another MTC graduate, Mariano Salcedo '25, SM '26, presented a custom web application that lets users create emergent visuals driven by real-time streaming music. The application uses algorithms that draw on the visual behavior of self-organized systems to produce visuals that respond to music as it plays.
Salcedo, who was also a student speaker at the 2026 SHASS Advanced Degree Ceremony, connected the technical work to a broader responsibility. In his oration, he said, "I think what times like this call from us is to lead the way in human and humane-centered technology, which means we don’t only just ask what we can build, but we also ask who is it going to affect, who is not going to affect? Who does it benefit?"
Keeping the Human Musician at the Center
The showcase's keynote came from Associate Professor Anna Huang SM '08 of MTA and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS, through SCC). Huang, a graduate of the MIT Media Lab and a leading researcher in collaborative human-AI music-making, delivered a presentation titled "In Search of Resonance in Human-AI Interaction."
Her message aligned with the student work: AI in music should remain oriented around human musicians. The keynote emphasized centering the human musician in AI-related music technology and making room for all musics of the world in the conversation whenever possible.
That idea gives the showcase its clearest throughline. The projects were technically ambitious, but they were also asking human questions: How can a musician perform when the body can no longer move as before? How can AI contribute to improvisation without replacing the performer? How can music drive visual systems, and how can movement generate sound?
For MIT's MTC program, the first research showcase functioned as both a debut and a statement of direction. Its students are treating music technology as a field where computation, performance, accessibility and artistic judgment have to be designed together. The result is a research agenda that looks beyond tools and asks what new forms of musical expression those tools might make possible.