Tod Machover (MIT Media Lab) is a man who shares my afflictions of fast talking and love for interacting with music. This past March, Tod gave an inspiring talk at the TED conference about the power of creating and performing music as a medium for self-expression.
(Tod’s talk also available here)
Just in case you get lost in his whirlwind, here are his three main points:
- “Music is even more powerful if you don’t just listen to it but you make it yourself.”
- “[Music] is transformative … music can change your life more than almost anything.”
- “[Music] is one of the best ways of showing who we really are … it is one of the most powerful interfaces we have to the outside world.”
Like Tod, we believe that music is more than just a rigid set of skills. Anyone can interact with music and extract its benefits— it just takes the right approach.
To showcase this point, Tod invited Dan Ellsey, a composer with cerebral palsy, to perform his piece aided with technology created especially for him. (Dan’s performance starts at 17:40 in the above video.)
Remarkable.