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MIT Professor Michael Hawley
cyranoVR writes "Today's CBS This Morning ran an interesting profile on MIT Professor Michael Hawley. Aside from recently publishing a super-jumbo-sized book about the Kingdom of Bhutan, he has invented (among other things) an interactive kitchen counter, designed a heart monitor embedded in jewelry, contributed to the MIT Toys of Tomorrow project and has written several classical compositions for piano. What really struck me was Hawley's observation that 'today's computers aren't musical enough.' For him, there is 'no difference between an ivory keyboard and a QWERTY keyboard.' I think it's a good thing that the mainstream media is starting to show how 'computer nerds' (as the correspondent identified Hawley) can be rich individuals with much more to their lives than hardware upgrades, programming languages and pocket protectors."
Did they retire Weizenmbaum or what ? I always assumed they'd only have room for one of these certified kook types.
Have youy looked at that gentleman's publication list on his web site ?
- travels to Bhutan ???
- photo mosaics ??
- essays in "technology review" ??
Apparently the good professor never had scientific research published of which he is proud enough to mention it on his home page.
Oh well. MIT.
It is really odd that a MIT professor, who is virtually unpublished, and apparently highly ignorant, in the field of computer music, is sparking a conversation about musical interfaces. Even the MIDI standard, which has been in active use for more than 20 years defies his belief that computers consider a QWERTY keyboard in an equivalent manner to a musical keyboard. Admittedly, MIDI is catastrophically lossy approximation of musical gesture, but it allows all sorts of parallel nuance to be transmitted to computers -- and has done so for two decades. There are even developments at the Media Lab itself, which are not considered to be the best in the field, with interactive musical interfaces which far outpace this ignorant characterization of music technology. Bio-electric senors, accelerometers, bend sensors, pressure sensors, ad nauseum... all are actively being utilized by composers throughout the world to extend the musical performance interface. It is like he has his head under a rock. The fact that he doesn't acknowledge such developments is disturbing for a professor at the MIT Media Lab. This statement could have been made as late as 1982 and no further.