MIT’s Spring Soundtrack

Every season needs a soundtrack and MIT's Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) is providing the sounds of spring. Since late February, CAST has presented the Spring Sound Series, a slate of concerts, lectures, and demonstrations featuring prominent music and multimedia artists.

The weekly series, presented in conjunction with course 21M.380 (Music and Technology), has featured African drumming, Indian classical music, and jazz improvisation, plus hybrid performances that meld music with fields like science, engineering, and robotics.

From CAST:

"The series will explore mechanical experimentation, algorithmic modes of composition and performance, playful and improvisatory processes, and the material, spatial, and kinetic properties of sound. These artists re-imagine the tools, machines, and techniques for creative expression while negotiating the blurred boundaries between the technical and aesthetic, the electronic and organic, and composition and invention."

The series, which has already featured composer and architect Christopher Janney '78, concludes over the next month. The final two performances feature MIT alumni: violinist Julia Ogrydziak '96 and designer Andy Cavatorta SM '10.

Ogrydziak’s performance takes place Wednesday, May 1, at noon at Killian Hall. She is a San Francisco-based violinist, composer, and visual artist whose live performances combine electronic and indie music, architecture, digital media, nature, and science.

At MIT, Ogrydziak earned undergraduate degrees in physics and music. A former researcher in the Media Lab’s Hyperinstruments Group, she received the AMITA Award for most outstanding woman graduate.

[Listen to Ogrydziak perform “Shark” from the show Okeanos held in San Francisco in April 2012.]

Cavatorta will perform Wednesday, May 8, at noon at Killian Hall. A Media Lab graduate, he has designed robotic musical instruments such as the BloBot and Whirly-Bot. His best-known creation, the Gravity Harp, is a three-meter-long pendulum with an attached harp that was featured in the Bjork album Biophilia.

Cavatorta, who is based in New York, has also collaborated with Amorphic Robot Works and the Museum of Science exhibit, “Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination.”

[Watch a 2011 demonstration of Bjork’s Gravity Harp, which was created by Cavatorta.]

Visit the Spring Sound Series site for the full schedule. The series is co-presented by the MIT Music & Theater Arts Program and is free and open to the general public.