Philadelphia Voices, the sixth and largest-scale installment of Tod Machover’s acclaimed City Symphony projects, premieres in April 2018 with the Philadelphia Orchestra, led by its music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, with a troupe of voices representing multiple Philadelphia-area choruses.  Machover, a 2012 Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of Musical America’s 2016 Composer of the Year award, has long been regarded as one of the most notable trailblazers of 20th and 21st century composition, and one the world’s leading authorities on the vast and evolving relationships between music, technology, and human expression.  Through specially-designed mobile technologies developed by Machover and his Opera of the Future group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, Machover has given residents of Philadelphia the opportunity to contribute their own samplings of cityscapes, vocalizations, and texts, reviewed and compiled by Machover and his team, uniting the richly diverse communities of Philadelphia through sound.  The result is a celebration of the birthplace of American democracy written for, and with, the Philadelphians who know it best.

Click below for video of Tod Machover introducing the Philadelphia Voices project with a call to participate:

Tod Machover
Tod Machover has been called “a musical visionary” by the New York Times, as well as “America’s most wired composer” by the Los Angeles Times. Machover is Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media at the MIT Media Lab, where he is also Adademic Head and directs the Opera of the Future Group. Machover's compositions have been commissioned and performed by many of the world's most prestigious ensembles and soloists, and his work has been awarded numerous prizes and honors. He is also recognized for designing new technologies for music, such as Hyperinstruments, and for his visionary operas like the “robotic” Death and the Powers. In addition to Philadelphia Voices, Machover has recently completed his next opera, Schoenberg in Hollywood, to be premiered by Boston Lyric Opera in fall 2018, and is working on commissions from the Kronos Quartet and the Montreal Symphony.

The MIT Media Lab
At the MIT Media Lab, the future is lived, not imagined. In a world where radical technology advances are taken for granted, Media Lab researchers design technologies for people to create a better future. Now, as it looks beyond its 30th anniversary, the MIT Media Lab focuses on “human adaptability.” Its work ranges from initiatives to treat conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and depression, to sociable robots that can monitor the health of children or the elderly, to the development of smart prostheses that can mimic—or even exceed—the capabilities of our biological limbs, to music that can radically shape community or reshape the mind.

Future-obsessed artist-designers, nanotechnologists, biologists, neuroscientists, data-visualization experts, industry researchers, pioneers of computer interfaces, and social activists work side by side to tirelessly invent—and reinvent—how humans experience, and can be aided by, technology, and to make sure that developments are deployed throughout the world for maximum benefit to individuals and societies.