MIT Launches Music Technology Graduate Program; Inaugural Showcase Highlights Brain-Computer Interfaces and AI-Driven Music
On May 13, 2026, MIT’s new Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program opened its doors to the public with a debut showcase at the Thomas Tull Concert Hall in the newly finished Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building. Five first‑year students, a handful of PhD researchers, and faculty members gathered to demonstrate the interdisciplinary breadth the program is designed to nurture.
The initiative, launched in the fall of 2024, is a partnership between the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) and the School of Engineering (SoE). The Linde Music Building, completed in 2025, provided the physical foundation—state‑of‑the‑art studios, rehearsal rooms, and a dedicated music‑technology laboratory—while the Schwarzman College of Computing added computational resources and expertise. SHASS Dean Agustín Rayo, SoE Dean Paula Hammond, and MTC Director Eran Egozy opened the evening, framing the program as a fusion of musical creativity, engineering rigor, and artificial intelligence.
Rayo declared the program’s ambition: “to lead the world in music technology theory and application,” emphasizing cross‑disciplinary collaboration as the engine that will shape artistic expression in an AI‑driven era. Hammond underscored the shared mathematical underpinnings of music and engineering, praising MIT’s unique ability to bring together leading technologists and musicians. Egozy described the event as a “harmonious hybrid of concert and symposium,” noting that the rapid progress of the inaugural cohort validates the feasibility of a one‑year master’s format.
The showcase featured a spectrum of research projects. Claire Southard, a 2025 MTC graduate, presented a machine‑learning model that translates electroencephalogram (EEG) signals into musical notes, offering a pathway for musicians with movement disorders to perform through imagined music. Other demonstrations included a real‑time visualization of an AI co‑improvising agent’s forthcoming piano notes, a sound‑art installation that leverages noisy network communication, a hip‑hop dance circle that generates music from movement, and a system that uses EEG signals to identify imagined tunes. Mariano Salcedo unveiled a web application that produces emergent visuals driven by live music streams, while Anna Huang—affiliated with both MTA and EECS—delivered a keynote on human‑AI interaction in music.
The event also spotlighted the work of several Quanta Fellows. Rachel Loh showcased visualizations of internal states during live human‑AI improvisation; Noble Harasha explored modeling noisy analog communication in feedback‑driven networks; Z Chen presented generative music for social choreography; and Stephen Brade, Suwan Kim, and Valerie Chen performed a dialogue between cello and a real‑time diffusion model trained on whale songs.
Looking forward, the program plans to admit ten master’s students for the 2026‑27 academic year, drawing from a pool of more than 100 applicants. The new cohort will include graduates from institutions outside MIT, broadening the program’s perspective. Faculty from MTA and EECS—such as Mark Rau, Paris Smaragdis, and Anna Huang—are actively recruiting new PhD students for their labs.
The inaugural showcase demonstrates MIT’s capacity to blend cutting‑edge research with live performance, underscoring the university’s commitment to interdisciplinary music technology education and positioning the program as a leading force in the evolving landscape of music and technology.
