About City Symphonies
City Symphonies aim to bring creative musical participation to everyone, while encouraging collaboration between artists and amateurs, with symphony orchestras (and many other organizations) as the principal galvanizers. Developed by composer-inventor-professor Tod Machover and his team in the Opera of the Future group at the MIT Media Lab, City Symphonies invite the citizens of a particular place to listen to the world around them, to discover the “music” in that place, and to work together to create a sonic portrait of that city that reveals its essential qualities and most important issues and questions to audiences locally and around the world. Going beyond crowd-sourcing, City Symphonies propose a new model of collaboration, where people of all ages and backgrounds work together to make beautiful, meaningful music that none of them–including the highest level professionals–could have made alone.
Since 2013, Tod Machover and his team have created City Symphonies in collaboration with citizens of Philadelphia, Detroit, Lucerne, Perth, Edinburgh, and Toronto.
Latest - Philadelphia Voices
About
Philadelphia Voices is the sixth and largest-scale installment of Tod Machover’s acclaimed City Symphonies. Through specially-designed mobile technologies developed by Machover and his Opera of the Future group at the MIT 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.
Philadelphia Voices premiered on April 5, 2018 (with two subsequent performances on April 6th and 7th) with The Philadelphia Orchestra, led by its music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, with a troupe of voices - Westminster Symphonic Choir, Keystone State Boys Choir and Pennsylvania Girlchoir, Sister Cities Girlchoir - representing Philadelphia-area choruses. The final performance of Philadelphia Voices took place in New York at Carnegie Hall on April 10, 2018, marking the first presentation of a City Symphony given outside the city for which it was written. For more information about the project, visit here.
Philadelphia Voices in the News
Philadelphia Voices is the sixth and largest-scale installment of Tod Machover’s acclaimed City Symphonies. Through specially-designed mobile technologies developed by Machover and his Opera of the Future group at the MIT 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.
Philadelphia Voices premiered on April 5, 2018 (with two subsequent performances on April 6th and 7th) with The Philadelphia Orchestra, led by its music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, with a troupe of voices - Westminster Symphonic Choir, Keystone State Boys Choir and Pennsylvania Girlchoir, Sister Cities Girlchoir - representing Philadelphia-area choruses. The final performance of Philadelphia Voices took place in New York at Carnegie Hall on April 10, 2018, marking the first presentation of a City Symphony given outside the city for which it was written. For more information about the project, visit here.
Philadelphia Voices in the News
Philadelphia Voices Blog Posts
Q&A with Tod Machover
What's the process of creating a city symphony like?
It’s hard! First, we invite everyone in a city to collaborate with us to make a sonic portrait of that place. Then we have to convince people that it is worth spending their time working with us; we know how busy everyone is and how crazy our project sounds. Then we reach out in numerous ways - via mobile apps that we make available so that people can record sounds and voices, online software that makes it possible to compose and morph original music, in public and school workshops to trade ideas and sounds, and through interactive progress reports throughout the process - to make it possible for anyone, regardless of age, background or musical experience, to be part of the project. We go into each city with no preconceptions, explore the place, meet as many people as possible, collect sounds and ideas, bring people together in bold ways, and see what musical story emerges. Our team listens to everything…..and finally I pull it all together, turn it into a piece of music (with or without imagery), and bring the final result to the public. The goal is to make a musical work which is meaningful locally and worldwide, now and forever, and is a source of creative satisfaction for me, for our whole Opera of the Future team, and for everyone who has participated in each symphony, in any way whatsoever. Doing this as fully as possible is still a research project!
How do You choose which cities to work with?
The cities are chosen both out of our own personal, artistic and cultural interest, and opportunistically, because people hear about existing projects and decide they’d like one for their city as well. The first City Symphony was in Toronto, where the Toronto Symphony had asked me to create a new work for them. I said “Yes”! and proposed this “unusual” idea: to make a sonic portrait of Toronto using traditional musical elements as well as by listening to - and collecting - real sounds of the city…and by asking the whole city to collaborate in the process of creating the piece. The Toronto Symphony said “YES!”, we said “GULP!!”…and the rest is history.:)