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."

Comments

nerds?

[chrisopherpace]

"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." There is? Since when?

Media attention

[kuhneng]

I knew and interacted with Michael Hawley lightly for a year (temporary advisor at MIT).

From my experience, he was constantly chasing whatever research line was most likely to get him in the media while neglecting projects that seemed to have more research merit but less potential for media attention.

Re:Media attention

[kindofblue]

The entire Media Lab seems to follow that same pattern of pursuing fluffy PR-friendly pseudo-science. Wired had this to say about it: The Lab that Fell to Earth. (It's an ironic criticique given that Wired is very fluffy tech news.)

Contrast that to the MIT AI and CS Lab, which does and has done outstanding work, in hard AI, theory, robotics, vision, and so on.

Still, the Media Lab just seems like the most fun place to work.

Re:Media attention

[raisin]

I work at the Media Lab and have often felt that there's a sort of inverse relationship between the amount of (popular) press that some of the projects receive, and the actual value of the project itself. Things like an interactive kitchen counter are a good example of this, so the really interesting work can easily get lost in that.

For what it's worth, the Wired article, however, is way off, including some parts that are just completely made up and has all sorts of wild speculation from the article's author, much to the amusement of many of the people here. The author came in and was looking for dirt so that Wired could sell magazines (this was extremely successful, as that issue did really well on the newstand). This is not to say there's plenty of critique you could make about the lab, there was a Technology Review article, google cached here, written by a talented writer that made many more valid points by simply hanging a few professors with their own words. It's no longer particularly relevant anymore, but the author could teach the Wired guy a thing or two or seven.

keyboards

[Anonymous Coward]

I always thought it would be interesting for someone to devise an "instrument" out of the QWERTY keyboard. So many people are proficient with the standard keyboard they'd be instant musicians.

It would be a cool addition to MMORPG games where you can have real bards that actually play music via keyboard.

Re:Coding as an artform

[nodwick]

So whereas there are similarities, I think there are differences too, and I think the two input mechanisms reflect that. There is the other point that not all of us are maestro's with a musical instrument... the user-interface of the ivories might be slightly less user-friendly than the traditional QWERTY

The primary difference is that keys on a keyboard are binary input while piano keys are analog. How hard you strike them, your angle of approach, and other factors all combine to let you vary the sound you get. People have tried to model pianos (most notably via "digital pianos", which have been around for a long time now), but among musicians they're still considered to be tonally inferior.

I disagreed with the article quote that "For [Hawley], there is 'no difference between an ivory keyboard and a QWERTY keyboard'."I think the key will be to recognize that electronic music and the more classical type both have their own qualities and complement, rather than replace, each other. Sort of like how electric, acoustic, and classical guitars are all similar instruments but each have their own sound -- none is meant to replicate any other one.

WRONG

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

More rich individuals?, being a rich individual is measured in terms of how well you addapt to the social roles that are impossed nowdays?.
Slashdot is a social activity.
Please think about this: Name 1 comunity of non-geek persons that are more than 10 and that get together every day to discuss their ideas. There are NONE.
Now, look at Slashdot, are we unsocial terminal geeks?.
I Think the hole think is upside down. We are social people, actually more sociable than other social groups because we still belevie in some things like netiquete, we can maintain social contract. Actual society CAN'T. Slashdot is not a website, it's a social contract. EVERYONE can post here, and he will be listened, we have our methods to protect ourselves from those that don't know how to live in society, but we won't censor them or ask them to go away.

We are unsocial with many people because they comunicate in a different language, which is by definition aggresive and antisocial.

Re:Coding as an artform

[kid-noodle]

And I was right, sorry to reply to my own comment, but here is a link to the new scientist article on debugging by ear.

Re:Coding as an artform

[Anonymous Coward]

I made a post while back on the subject of 'musical' passwords. As a pianist and drummer I have developed an interesting technique to use very long complicated passwords and enter them very quickly. They have the property that they are deformable shapes, in space and sequence/time, very like melodic phrases. I enter these on a normal ascii keyboard, thus:

ijihijhijihijhi
popipoipopipoip
uyutuytuyutuyt u

All these are the same passwd transposed,
thats 3 in less than a second (not checked them for accuracy) You can get VERY quick at it and use secure passwords with great accuracy. The security comes from the sequence length not the diversity, I use 3 fingers, a better pianist/typist would use more.

They have another interesting property.
I can 'not know' the password and be able to enter it, if you ask me what it is I cant tell you. I have to sit at the keyboard and retreive the motor sequence to type it, then I can read it back and tell you.

Re:Coding as an artform

[cybin]

You definetly make a lot of excellent points here -- and it is a matter of personal perspective.

I guess a big part of this for me is that people who have the innovative instincts required to write the elegant code we're talking about sometimes confuse that with creativity in its most narrow definition -- fostering the creation of something new. Solving problems on the computer can lead to creative ends through innovation.

The code that I write on my signal processing software is ultimately used as a tool for the creation of electroacoustic music. Lots of this kind of music is all about the process used to create it, similar to what you talk about above. I take issue with that a lot of times, I don't think art should be about the process, especially when "normal" people (i.e. non EA-musicians, non-programmers, etc) find your music completely foreign... this is a huge problem for us.

I think the folks at the Media Lab, while they are smart, are primarily innovators -- they do work on things which will get them media attention. The things they come up with barely touch upon the issues that affect me as a computer geek and composer. I'm sure Dr. Hawley is an interesting person, but a lot of the stuff mentioned above is completely unrelated to what I do every day -- and his compositions probably have little to do with what's going on on the contemporary music scene. It just has a nice "wow" factor.

The futurists also upset a lot of traditional academic musicians, but that's a whole other story :)