June is an experienced entrepreneur and executive with a track record of creating and transforming game-changing organizations. Her extensive non-profit leadership experience includes serving since 2012 at the FSHD Society, a rare disease advocacy and funding organization. Previously, she co-founded the Alzheimer Research Forum and N-of-One, a pioneering precision medicine company.
“Having seen Hyperscore in action, I am driven to see this amazing technology realize its potential to transform how children experience music,” she says. “My passion is to make the world a better place by building sustainable models to promote health, wellness and culture.”
June is a graduate of Harvard College, where she concentrated in physics, and has been a writer and editor for Scientific American, Science, The New York Times Magazine, and many other national publications.
Two years ago, Tod Machover and June Kinoshita founded New Harmony Line to resurrect Hyperscore, the software which hundreds of school children have used to compose original music that has been woven into Tod’s Toy Symphony and City Symphony pieces and performed around the world. Hyperscore enables anyone to express themselves through original compositions without demanding years of musical training. It’s super fun to use, and more importantly, it helps young people “find their voice” and deepen their appreciation of musical culture—a lifelong gift.
We’re incredibly lucky to have Peter Torpey, Tod’s former PhD student at the Media Lab, join as CTO of New Harmony Line. Peter has redeveloped Hyperscore as a web application. This was a tour de force, and we now have a beta version that is being tested this fall in 24 classrooms across the U.S. and Europe. Our next step is to develop the back-end software so that we can release Hyperscore in the spring of 2022 to the educational market.
To help us fund this critical step, we have launched a Kickstarter campaign. We would love it so much if you would consider supporting it. Your financial backing would be amazing, but just as important is your help in sharing the campaign with your network. Our success depends critically on word of mouth, especially at the start of the campaign. We’d deeply appreciate your help in letting your friends and connections know about it. Encourage them to view the page and share it in turn to anyone they think might be excited by Hyperscore.
Hyperscore was invented by the Opera of the Future group of Tod Machover, the Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media at the M.I.T. Media Laboratory. A Pulitzer Prize-finalist and Emmy-winning composer, Tod is creator of City Symphonies. In 2016, he was named Composer of the Year by Musical America. Called a “musical visionary” by The New York Times and “America’s most wired composer” by The Los Angeles Times, Tod is an influential composer and inventor, praised for creating music that breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries and for developing technologies that expand music’s potential for everyone, from celebrated virtuosi to musicians of all abilities.
Hyperscore software, developed by his Media Lab team, has enabled children around the world to compose music which has been performed by chamber music ensembles like the Ying Quartet, rock bands, and major orchestras including the Philadelphia Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and Toronto Symphony Orchestra.
Tod studied with Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions at The Juilliard School and was the first Director of Musical Research at Pierre Boulez’s IRCAM in Paris. He is widely recognized for designing new technologies for music performance and creation, such as Hyperinstruments, “smart” performance systems that extend expression for virtuosi, from Yo-Yo Ma to Prince, as well as for the general public. The video games Guitar Hero and Rock Band were invented by graduates of Machover’s group at the Media Lab.
In 2015, Tod Machover and the M.I.T. Media Lab Opera of the Future team went to Lucerne, Switzerland, to develop a symphonic portrait of the historic city. “A Symphony for Lucerne” was premiered by the Lucerne Festival Orchestra in September, 2015. In this video, Machover is coaching students at a school who are composing original pieces using Hyperscore. The students worked collaboratively with each other and created a variety of wonderful pieces that expressed their energy, feelings about their city, and sense of humor.
We just discovered that the terrific documentary, “Urban Symphony,” which follows the development of A Toronto Symphony, is available to watch on YouTube. This was the very first of Tod Machover’s City Symphony projects and we get to see how the composer and his team at the M.I.T. Media Lab collected sounds of the city and collaborated with school children, varied communities in Toronto, and the musicians of the Toronto Symphony to create this kaleidoscopic sonic portrait of the city.
Hyperscore has been used by children around the world to compose original pieces. Their compositions have been performed by musicians, from rock bands to major orchestras. Check out this collection of some of our “greatest hits,” each one a wonderful expression of each child’s spirit. We can’t wait to release the new version of Hyperscore for the Web!
We have exciting updates about the future of New Harmony Line and Hyperscore. Until now, Hyperscore has been compatible only with the Windows operating system. Over the past year, we have been hard at work developing a platform-independent web-based application. Our new version of Hyperscore is on its way and we can’t wait to share it with you soon.
This summer, we will be holding training sessions for teachers who would like to learn about using Hyperscore for the Web in their classrooms. If you are interested in signing up, please contact us.
If you would like to support our mission to put this powerful music composition technology into the hands of school kids, please consider making a tax-deductible donation. Hyperscore for the Web will also be available to the general public, with sales revenue going to support our educational mission.
We are grateful for the enduring engagement from educators, youth groups, orchestras, and universities, and cannot wait to bring more people together. We are excited to expand our community of people who enjoy composing, want to share their creations, and connect over a love of music.
A Toronto Symphony is the first of composer Tod Machover’s City Symphonies. It was commissioned by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, who premiered the piece in March 2013. With this project, Machover – who is Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music & Media at the MIT Media Lab – “rethought the symphony as a community event” (Musical America), a portrait of a place created for and by the people who live there.
As Machover described when he launched the project publicly in 2012, the goal was to create a sonic portrait of Toronto by “listening” to the city in order to discover its special features, by inviting all Torontonians to collect and submit their favorite sounds of the city and also to create original musical compositions using the Media Lab’s Hyperscore software, and then to engage in online and in-person workshops and activities to help shape the composition itself. The result produced a model which Machover and his team have brought to cities around the world. The MIT Symphony Orchestra (MITSO), led by Evan Ziporyn, programmed A Toronto Symphony for a concert that was to have taken place on March 13, 2020.
For this occasion, Machover revised the composition and also invited the student players of MITSO to collaborate with him to create a new section of the piece, now called “MIT Interprets Toronto”, a new twist on the City Symphony model. Another surprise was in store for the project when it was announced that MIT had to shut down – and students needed to leave campus – on March 13th, the very day of the concert, which needed – of course – to be cancelled. However, the MITSO players voted to come in for what would have been the dress rehearsal on the evening of March 12th, to play together for one last time before dispersing, and to record the music for the concert.
This video is of that March 12th recording, filmed by Peter Torpey, Paula Aguilera and Jonathan Williams. Torpey – who created the original visuals for the Toronto premiere – combined live footage of MITSO with collected visuals from Toronto, and added evocative new material as well. The video of Toronto’s CN Tower in the Toronto Dances finale is live footage from the 2013 premiere, when Machover, Torpey and team synchronized the tower’s LED lighting to the orchestral performance which was broadcast by the CBC.
Of this video performance, Tod Machover says: “Although we were not able to give the public performance of A Toronto Symphony as planned, it is especially meaningful to have this documentation of the piece that represents months of devoted work by MITSO and Evan Ziporyn. I am delighted that these young musicians were able to perform this difficult music so well. I’m also pleased that the piece ’transposed’ smoothly from Toronto to Cambridge (complete with a new section), and that orchestral music, electronics, “found” sounds, and multilayered visuals are combined just as I originally imagined them.”
This city symphony was commissioned for the Perth International Arts Festival 2014 and premiered on March 1, 2014, by the Western Australia Symphony orchestra under the baton of Carolyn Kuan.
In our blog post, Tod Machover writes: “As part of our Symphony for Perth project, we have invited young people from throughout Greater Perth, in Western Australia, to create original compositions using our Hyperscore software, expressing some aspect of life – and sound – in Perth. Students from elementary through high school, and from the CBD to Narrogin, worked on their pieces from October through mid-December (brought together by Jemma Gurney, the amazing Education Coordinator at the Perth Festival). I was lucky enough to visit eight different schools when I was in Perth this fall, and got to hear all this music as it was developing. Great experience! Final compositions were sent to me a couple of weeks ago, and I have been listening to them ever since to decide how to incorporate as many of these brilliant, vivid musical visions as possible into the final Symphony.
The official website for the project provides additional details about the work and technology.
Check out this article in The Guardian with sound recordings of giant flies, garrulous cockatoos, and didgeridoo, among others.
Reporter Andrea Shea delves into the creation of Tod Machover’s newest symphonic work, “Philadelphia Voices.”
From the famous Mummers’ New Year’s Day Parade to the sizzling of celebrated cheesesteaks, acclaimed U.S composer and inventor Tod Machover has been collecting sounds for his latest piece ‘Philadelphia Voices,’ a composition inspired by the heritage, sights and sounds of Philadelphia, the city known as the birthplace of American democracy.
Then in his barn studio, next to his Boston home, he manipulates these hours and hours of recording, crafting them into the music and soundscape for the piece. We also have behind the scenes access as the composition receives its premiere performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra and local choirs.
