I am very pleased to welcome you to an unusual musical adventure, a “collaborative” symphony about and for Perth, Australia, that I will create over the coming months along with any of you with a strong connection to Perth: if you live in Perth, come from Perth, or simply love Perth, please join me on this journey. Under the auspices of the Perth International Arts Festival and the MIT Media Lab, where I am a composer, inventor and Professor of Music & Media, I will be creating this new composition entitled From the Desert to the Deep Blue Sea: A Symphony for Perth that will be premiered by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra as a finale to the Festival on March 1, 2014. Instead of writing this piece alone, I invite all of you to collaborate on the creation and development of this symphony.

You can start right away by sending me audio recordings of your favorite Perth sounds – ocean, traffic, voices, surprises…anything that conjures Perth for you -along with any audio or text explanations you might want to add. If you have a smartphone or recording device, all you have to do is capture a sound around you and upload it to our special SoundCloud account, or you can send sounds and comments to perth@media.mit.edu. If you can send me sounds before December 1, it will be more likely that I’ll be able to include them in the symphony.

Between now and March 1, this website will be updated regularly. Please subscribe to receive information about the project and how you can continue to participate in the development of this special symphony for your city. There will be increasingly collaborative ways to influence the piece as it develops, using special music apps from the MIT Media Lab that we’ll be posting online.

For further information about the piece and the Festival, please visit the official Perth International Arts Festival website.

For further information about previous collaborative symphonies, you might be interested in looking at our previous projects in Toronto and Edinburgh.

I hope very much that you will join me in this exciting endeavor and look forward to making music with you soon!

Tod

Tod Machover
MIT Media Lab
Cambridge, U.S.A.
www.todmachover.com