(Links for these talks: Craig Venter … Freeman Dyson … Kwabena Boahen … the Theme “What’s Next in Tech” … and check out Stefan Kreitmayer’s blog.)

Cross the Wii hacking of Johnny Lee with the creativity tools of Tod Machover, and you get Digital Wheel Art — a wheelchair that uses a hacked Wii Remote to help disabled people make paintings. As Gizmodo reports, inventor YoungHyun Chung showed off the device at the Maker Faire in NYC last night. Watch the video from Chung’s thesis site:

Digital Wheel Art from YoungHyun Chung on Vimeo.

Watch Tod Machover and Dan Ellsey’s talk and performance on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

Read more about Tod Machover and Dan Ellsey on TED.com.

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The first idea I’d like to suggest is that we all love music a great deal, it means a lot to us. But music is even more powerful if you don’t just listen to it, but you make it yourself. So, that’s my first idea. And we all know about the Mozart effect, the idea that’s been around for the last five to ten years: That just by listening to music or by playing music to your baby in vitro, that it’ll raise our IQ points 10, 20. 30%.

Great idea, but it doesn’t work at all. You can’t just listen to music, you have to make it somehow. And I’d add to that, that it ‘s not just making it, but everybody, each of us, everybody in the world has the power to create and be part of music in a very dynamic way, and that’s one of the main parts of my work. So, with the MIT Media Lab for quite a while now. We’ve been engaged in a field called the act of music. What are all the possible ways that we can think of, to get everybody in the middle of a musical experience? Not just listening, but by making music.

And we started by making instruments for some of the greatest performers – we call these “Hyper Instruments” – for Yo Yo Ma, Peter Gabriel, Prince, orchestras, rock band – instruments where there all kinds of sensors built right into the instrument, so the instrument knows how it’s being played. And just by changing the interpretation and feeling, I can change my cello into a voice, or change a whole orchestra into something that nobody has ever heard before.

When we started making these, I started thinking why can’t we make wonderful instrument like that for everybody, people who aren’t fantastic Yo Yo Mas or Princes. So, we’ve made a whole series of instruments. One of the largest collections is called the Brain Opera. It’s a whole orchestra of about a 100 instruments. All designed for anybody to play using natural skill. So, you can play a video game, drive through a piece of music, use your body gesture to control huge masses of sound, touch a special surface to make melodies, use you voice to make a whole aura. And when we make the Brain Opera, we invite the public to come in to try these instruments and then collaborate with us to help make each performance of the Brain Opera. We toured that for a long time. It is now permanently in Vienna, where we built a museum around it.
And that led to something that you probably do know. Guitar Hero came out of our lab and my two teenage daughters and most of the students at the MIT Media Lab are proof that if you make the right kind of interface, people are really interested in being in the middle of a piece of music and playing it over and over and over again.

So, the model works, but it’s only the tip of the ice berg, because my second idea is that it’s not enough to want to make music in something like Guitar Hero, and music is very fun, but it’s also transformative. It’s very, very important, music can change your life, more than almost anything, it can change the way you communicate with others, it can change your body, it can change you mind.

So, we’re trying to go to the next step of how you build on top of something like Guitar Hero. We’re very involved in education. We have a long term project called Toy Symphony, where you make all kinds of instruments that are also addictive, but for little kids, so the kids will fall in love with making music, want to spend their time doing it, and then will demand to know how it works, how to make more, how to create. So, we make squeezey instruments, like these “Music Shapers” that measure the electricity in your fingers, “Beat Bugs” that let you tap in rhythms, they gather you rhythm, and like hot potato, you send your rhythm to your friends and have to imitate or respond to what your doing, and a software package called Hyper Score, which lets anybody use lines and color to make quite sophisticated music, extremely easy to use, but once you use it, you can go quite deep in to music of any style. And then by pressing a button, it turns into a music notation, so that live musicians can play your pieces.

We’ve had good enough, really very powerful effects with kids around the world and now people of all ages using Hyper Score. So, we’ve got more and more interested in using these kind of creative activities in a much broader context, for all kinds of people who don’t usually have the opportunity to make music.

So, one of the growing fields that we’re working on at the Media Lab right now is music, mind and health. A lot of you have probably seen Oliver Sack’s wonderful new book called Musicophelia. It’s on sale in the bookstore. It’s a great book. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth reading. He’s a pianist himself. He details his whole career of looking at and observing incredibly powerful effects that music has had on peoples’ lives in unusual situations.

So, we know for instance that music is always the last thing that people with advance Alzheimer’s can still respond to. Maybe many of you have noticed this with loved ones, you can find somebody who can’t recognize their face in the mirror, or can’t tell anyone in their family, you can still find a shard of music that that person will jump out of their chair and start singing, and with that, you can bring back parts of people’s memories and personalities. Music is the best way to restore speech for people who have lost it to strokes, movement to people with Parkinson’s disease. It’s very powerful for depression, schizophrenia, many, many things.

So we’re working on understanding those underlying principles and then building activities, which will let music really improve people’s health. And we do this in many ways. We work with many different hospitals. One of them is right near Boston, called Tewksbury Hospital. It’s a long-term state hospital, where several years ago, we started working with Hyper Score and patients with physical and mental disabilities. This has become a central part of the treatment of Tewksbury hospital, so everybody there clamors to work on musical activities. It’s the activity that seems to accelerate people’s treatment the most. And it also brings the entire hospital together as an entire community. I wanted to show you a quick video of some of this work before I go on.

[Video]

They’re manipulating these musical rhythms. That’s the real experience, not only do they learn how to play and listen to rhythms, but to train you musical memory and playing music in a group. Keep their hands on music to shape themselves, change it, to experiment with it, to make their own music. So Hyper Score lets you start from scratch very quickly. Everybody can experience music in a profound way, we just have to make different tools.

The third idea I want to share with you is that music, paradoxically, I think even more than words, is one of the very best ways of showing who we really are. I love giving talks, although, I strangely feel more nervous giving talks than playing music. If I were here playing cello or playing synth or sharing my music with you. I’d be able to show things about myself that I can’t tell you in words, more personal things, perhaps, deeper things.

I think that’s true for may of us, and I want to give you two examples of how music is one of the most powerful interfaces we have for ourselves for the outside world. The first is a really crazy project that we’re building right now called Death and the Powers. And it’s a big opera, one of the larger opera projects going on in the world right now. And it’s about a man, rich, successful, powerful who wants to live forever. So he figures out a way to download himself into his environment, actually into a series of books. So this guy wants to live forever, he downloads himself into this environment. The main singer disappears at the beginning of the opera and the entire stage becomes the main character, it becomes his legacy.

And the opera is about what we can share, what we can pass on to others. The people we can love and what we can’t. Every object in the opera comes alive and is a gigantic music instrument, like the chandelier takes up the whole stage. It looks like a chandelier, but it’s actually a robotic music instrument. So, as you can see in this prototype, gigantic piano strings, each string is controlled by a little robotic element, and there are little bows that stroke the strings, propellers that tickle the strings, acoustic signals that vibrate the strings.

We also have an army of robots on stage. These robots are the kind of the intermediary between the main character, Simon Powers, and his family. There are a whole series of them, kind of like a Greek chorus. They observe the action. We design these square robots that we’re testing right now at MIT called “operabots.” These operabots follow my music. They follow the characters. They’re smart enough, we hope, not to bump into each other. They go off on their own. And they can also, when you snap, line up exactly the way you’d like to. Even though they’re cubes, they actually have a lot of personality.

The largest set piece in the opera is called “The System.” It’s a series of books. Every single book is robotic, so they all move, they all make sound, and when you put them all together, they turn these walls, which have the gesture and personality of Simon Powers, who’s disappeared, but the whole physical environment becomes this person. This is how he’s chosen to represent himself. The books also have a high pact LEDs on spines. So, it’s all displayed. And here’s the great baritone James Maddalena as he enters the system. This is a sneak preview.

This premier is in Monaco, in September 2009, if any chance that you can make it. Another idea with this project, here’s this guy building his legacy through this very unusual for, through music and the environment. But we’re also making this available online and in public spaces as a way of each of us to use music and images of our lives to make our own legacy or to make a legacy of someone we love. So, instead of being grand opera, this opera will turn into what we’re thinking of as this personal opera.

If your going to make a personal opera, what about a personal instrument. Everything I’ve shown you so far, whether it’s a hyper cello for Yo Yo Ma or squeezey toy for a child, the instruments stayed the same and are valuable for a certain class of person, or virtuoso, or a child. But what if I could make an instrument that can be adapted to the way I personally behave, to the way my hands work, to what I do very skillfully, perhaps, to what I don’t do so skillfully. I think that this is the future of interface, the future of music, the future of instruments.

And Id like to invite two very special people on stages, so that I can give you an example of what personal instruments will be like. So, can you give a hand to Adam Boulanger, PhD student from the MIT Media Lab, and Daniel Ellsey. Dan, thanks to TED and to Bomberdier Flexjet, Dan is here with us today all the way from Tewksbury. He’s a resident at Tewksbury Hospital. This is by far the farthest he’s strayed from Tewksbury Hospital, I can tell you that. Because he’s motivated to meet with you today and show you his own music. So, first of all, Dan, do want to say hi to everyone and tell everyone who you are?

Dan: Hello. My name is Dan Ellsey. I am 34 years old and I have cerebral palsy. I have always loved music and I’m excited to be able to conduct my own music with this new software.

Machover: And we’re really excited to have you here, really Dan. So we met Dan about three years ago, three-and-a-half years ago, when we started working at Tewksbury. Everybody we met there was fantastic, did fantastic music. Dan had never made music before and it turned out that he was really fantastic at it. He’s a born composer. He’s very shy too.

So, turned out he’s a fantastic composer and over the last few years has been in constant collaborator for us. He has made many, many pieces. He has made many CDs. Actually, he is quite well known in the Boston area, mentors people at the hospital and children locally in how to make their own music. And I’ll let Adam tell you. So Adam is a PhD student at MIT, an expert in music technology and medicine. And Adam and Dan have become close collaborators. What Adam’s been working on in this last period is not only how to have Dan be able to easily make his own pieces, but how he can perform his piece by using this kind of personal instrument. So, you want to say a little bit about how you guys work.

Adam: Yes. So, Tod and I entered into a discussion following the Tewksbury work and it was really about how Dan is an expressive person and he’s an intelligent and creative person. And it’s in his face, it’s in his breathing, it’s in his eyes. How come he can’t perform one of his pieces of music? That’s our responsibility and it doesn’t’ make sense.

So we started developing a technology that will allow him with nuance, with new precision, with control and despite his physical disability, to be able to do that, to be able to perform his piece of music. So, the process and the technology, basically, first we need an engineering solution, so, you know, we have a fire wire camera, it looks at an infrared pointer. We went with the type of gesture, metaphor that he was already used to with his speaking controller. And this actually the least interesting part of the work, you know, as the design process, we needed an input, we needed continuous tracking, and the software we look at the types of shapes he’s making.

But then the really interesting aspect of the work followed the engineering part, where basically, we’re coding over Dan’s shoulder at the hospital extensively to figure out, you know, how does Dan move. What’s useful to him as an expressive motion? You know, what’s his metaphor for performance? What types of things does he find important to control and convey in a piece of music. So all the parameter fitting, really the technology was stretched at that point to fit just Dan. And you know I think this is a perspective shift. It’s not that with our technologies, they provide an access that allows us to create pieces of creative work. But what about expression? What about that moment when an artist delivers a piece of work? You know, do our technologies allow us to express? Do they provide structure for us to do that? And, you know, that’s a personal relationship to expression that is lacking in the technological spheres.
So, you know, with Dan we needed a new design process and new engineering process, to sort of discover his movements and his path to expression to allow him to perform and so that’s what we’ll do today.

Machover: So let’s do it. So Dan do you want to tell everyone about what you’re going to play now?

Dan: This is “My Eagle Song.”

Machover: So Dan is going to play a piece of his called “My Eagle Song.” In fact, this is the score of Dan’s piece. Completely composed by Dan in Hyper Score. So he can use his infrared tracker to go directly into Hyper Score. He’s incredibly fast at it. Faster than I am.

Dan: Yes I am.

Machover: He’s really modest too. So he can go into Hyper Score. You start out by making melodies and rhythms, and he can place those exactly where he wants. Each one gets a color, goes back into the composition window, draws the lines, places everything the way he wants to. Looking at the Hyper Score, you can see it also, so you can see where the sections are, something might continue for a while, change, get really crazy and then end up with a big bang at the end.

So that’s the way he made his piece, and as Adam says, we then figured out the best way to have him perform his piece. It’s going to be looked at by this camera, analyze his movements, it’s going to let Dan bring out all the different aspects of his movements that he wants to. And you’re also going to notice a visual on the screen. We asked one of or students to look at what the camera is measuring. So, but instead of making very literal, showing you exactly the camera tracing, we turned it into a graphic that shows you the basic movement and shows the way it’s being analyzed.
I think it gives an understanding how we’re picking out movement from what Dan’s doing, but I think it will also show you if you look at that movement that when Dan makes music, his motions are very purposeful, very precise, very disciplined and they’re also very beautiful. So, in hearing this piece as I mentioned before, the most important thing is the music’s great and it’ll show you who Dan is. So, are we ready Adam?

Adam: Yeah.

Machover: Ok, now Dan will play his piece “My Eagle Song” for you.

[Music]

This is about the point in the program where all the attendees start to talk about TED as an endurance sport. We’re mid-way, but it’s so intense that it feels like it has been going on for weeks…

The session, on "How do we create?", which will be moderated be TED’s June Cohen, opens with inventor-collector Jay Walker — who, as I already said in previous posts, has lent several dozen objects from his personal library to TED for the creation of this year’s stage — showing a few pictures of his fabled "library of the imagination", a 3-stories-high trove designed like an Escher painting, with glass bridges connecting upper levels, walls covered with ancient manuscripts, and incredible artifacts of human creation. Here a picture, possibly never seen before:

If you’ve seen and enjoyed "Pirates of the Caribbean" or "Star Wars"
(episodes I and II), a large part of your enjoyment was due to visual
effects wizard John Knoll of Industrial Light and Magic. Incidentally,
he’s also one of the co-inventors of graphic-editing software
Photoshop. So John knows his way in the alleys of creativity.
Visual effects in the script are what you can’t go out and shoot, sometimes because it doesn’t exist, or because it’s too dangerous (incredible stunts) or just not possible to do in any other way (he shows examples). There are different techniques to overcome this problem: matte paintings (an old technique for creating virtual sets where they painted landscapes on pieces of glass, superposing them on the original footage; now it’s done digitally of course), miniatures, blue/greenscreen composites, and computer graphics. John compares images from 1954′s "20’000 Leagues Under The Sea" with "Pirates": ships, sea battles, sea monsters scenes, simulation of water and waves.

Over
the past decade San Francisco-based designer Yves Béhar and
his firm Fuseproject have produced game-changing designs for cell phone
headsets (Jawbone), shoes (Birkenstock), computers (OLPC’s XO laptop)
or table lamps (Herman Miller’s "Leaf"). A while back Fast Company
magazine published a great profile of Yves.
His mother is Swiss, his father Turkish, he grew up in Switzerland, and he shows some of the objects that were around the home — furniture, carpets. "I realized that objects tell stories — and storytelling has been a big influence on my work. Then there was another influence, from my teen passions, ski and windsurfing — so I combined them into a contraption for surfing over frozen lakes. Then, design school, where I asked alot of questions — do people really need the caps-lock key on a computer keyboard? — and found this quote: "Advertising is the price companies pay for being un-original". I moved to SF, created my own firm, and started working on projects — watch, furniture, etc. The "Leaf" lamp was meant to create a new experience of light, giving a choice for the user to go from a glowing moonlight to a very bright worklight, and everything in between — we designed both the lamp and the bulb. All of these projects have a humanistic side to them.
Jawbone — the Bluetooth headset (photo below left) – has a humanistic side: it feels you skin and knows when you’re talking and when you’re talking it filters out the other surrounding noises. But it’s also about taking out the techie stuff and make it beautiful — if it isn’t beautiful, it really doesn’t belong on your face.
Design is never done — you have to do all this other stuff, packaging etc — and continue to touch the user. We developed a bottle for a vitamin-infused organic drink targeted at kids: the bottle is symmetrical from every side, and can have a second life as a toy using connectors. And because "why?" is one of the questions that kids ask more often, we called it Y Water (photo right):

His most recent project: NYC Condom, launched on Valentine’s day. The Dept of Health in NY needed a way to distribute 36 million condoms for free. fuseproject worked on a dispenser, which needs to be easily seviceable etc. They’re being installed all over the city. fuseproject also designed the condoms (and Béhar throws a handful of them into the audience…)
If we all work together in creating value and  keep in mind the values of the work that we do, maybe we can change the world.

Robert
J. Lang is an origami artist (origami: the ancient Japanese art of
paper-folding). He uses maths to analyze folding patterns and create
origamis with hundreds of folds and sophisticated curves. Most people still think that origami is flapping birds made of paper, but it’s really become something much more sophisticated — thank to mathematics. Origamis, Lang explains, revolve around crease patterns, and they all have to obey four laws: colorability (you can color them so that two colors never touch), always even folds (the number of folds always varies by two), alternate angles; and layer ordering (no matter how you stack a sheet, it can never penetrate a fold). If you obey these laws, you can do amazing things. And indeed, here are some of the origamis showed by Lang — they’re all single-sheet folds:

This has also allowed the creation of origami on-demand, including graphics, ads, and commercials. This for example is a video ad for Mitsubishi: everything in the ad is an origami, except the car:

The "extreme folding" structures developed for origamis turn out to have applications in medicine, science, and engineering: things like packing airbags, heart implants and spaceship and space telescope parts into the smallest
possible places. "An origami, someday, may even save a life".

Writer Amy Tan — American of Chinese
descent — has written a series of bestselling novels, including "The
Bonesetter’s Daughter" and "The Kitchen God’s Wife".  She’s also
written children books and has appeared in The Simpsons. She focuses on
the creative process, journeying through her childhood and family history looking for hints of where her own creativity comes from. The value of nothing: out of nothing comes something. That’s an essay she wrote when she was 11 and got a B+. How do we create? She shows a triangle with corners at Nature, Nurture and Nightmares. Some people would say that we’re born with it; others that creativity may be a function of some neurological quirk; part of it also begins with a sense of identity crisis (why I am not Black like everything else in my school class?), with childhood traumas,  with expectations. "This led to my big questions: why do things happen, how do they happen, and how do I make them happen? When I look at creativity, my inability to repress associations with everything about me is key". She goes off doing a comparison between quantum mechanics and creativity: "you’ve alot of unknown; dark energy and dark matter; the observer effect — if you try too hard what you’re hoping to find by serendipity at the end is no longer there; ambiguity; multi-dimensions. Much has to do with intention. You notice disturbing hints from the universe, and then in a way I knew that they’ve always been there. What I need in effect is a focus. When I have a question, I have a focus, and all these object go through that question. You think that there is some coincidence or serendipity that your’e getting all this help from the universe, but it really is that now you’ve a focus. Why am I here? When I look at all these things that are morally ambiguous, it seems so obvious, and yet it is not. We all hate moral ambiguity, and yet it is so necessary in writing a story, it’s the place where I begin. Luck, chance of course, and accidents also play a role, often a mysterious role. How do I create something out of nothing? By questioning, and acknowledging that there are no absolute truths. By thinking about luck and fate, coincidences and accidents, God’s will and the synchrony of mysterious forces. By thinking about our role. By imagining fully and becoming what is imagined. And that’s how I find particles of truth. So there are never complete answers. Or if there is one is it to remind myself that there is uncertainty in everything, and that’s good. And if there is a more complete answer, it is to simply imagine. Imagination is the closest thing to feeling compassion".
She carried a bag on stage at the beginning of her speech. She opens it now to reveal what’s in the bag: her dog, who trots out of stage .

June shows a clip from Marjane Satrapi‘s animated movie "Persepolis", based on her autobiographical novel of the same name about a young girl coming of age against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution.

Tod
Machover is the Head of the MIT Media Lab‘s Hyperinstruments/Opera of
the Future Group (now that’s a job title). He has composed five operas
and invented several musical technologies, including "hyperinstruments"
– an approach that extends virtuosity. (Yo-Yo Ma and Prince among others have
adopted it).
"We all love music, but it’s more powerful if you don’t just listen to it but make it. Everybody in the world has the power to be part of music in a very dynamic way. At the Media Lab we’ve been engaged in an approach called Active Music. We started by making hyperinstruments that have all kind of sensors built in, so the instrument knows how it is been played. We asked ourselves: why can’t we make instruments like those for everybody — and that produced the Brain Opera, and Guitar Hero. Music is very transformative, can change your life, your body, your mind.

Music, even better than words, is a powerful way to explain who we are. If I was playing cello here I could share things about myself that I can’t do in words. Music is a very powerful interface". Machover shows the "Chandelier", a central set piece in a new opera he’s written called "Death and the Powers" which will premiere in Monaco in September 2009: it’s both a sculpture and a new kind of musical instrument (picture right).
Most recently, Machover has focused on using music in therapy
for the physically and mentally handicapped and on developing
technologies to allow them to compose and perform music . What if I could make an instrument that adapt to I really am, to my real capacities, Machover asks, and he calls up on stage Adam Boulanger, a PhD student working with him, and Dan Ellsey,
a cerebral palsy patient in a wheelchair. Dan
communicates via a computer-controlled "talking box". Boulanger and Machover developed technology allowing Dan to use his limited possibilities of expression to create and perform music by using both
brain waves and small movements of his face and eyes. Dan performs his composition — and the music is great, and it gets a standing ovation.