Wellbeing Of The World
A Global Symphony
“Wellbeing of the World – A Global Symphony” is an international, collaborative music project by composer/inventor Tod Machover and his team at the MIT Media Lab. Over the next two years the music project will sample perspectives on inner, organisational, societal and planetary wellbeing at the Regional Wellbeing Summits, as well as more generally, all leading up to the Global Wellbeing Summit in 2025. This uniquely exciting initiative aims at exploring through sounds of all kinds how different cultures and communities explore the journey of wellbeing for individuals, organisations, communities, societies and the planet, for the current moment as well as for the future.
The model which brought this highly original initiative to life is to be found in the City Symphonies, a project developed by Machover and the MIT Media Lab since 2013, which invited citizens of a specific city from all ages and backgrounds to work together to create its sonic portrait, constructed from contributed sounds ranging from musical to noise, composed to “found,” and from expert to anything. This project was also brought to Bilbao on the occasion of the 2022 Global Wellbeing Summit for Social Change. City Symphonies have not only resulted in powerfully memorable musical compositions, but also have built extraordinary community and cultivated creativity in radical new ways.
With “Wellbeing of the World – A Global Symphony,” Tod Machover, the MIT Media Lab, The Wellbeing Project and The Regional Wellbeing Summits are launching a new initiative whose ambition is to collect sounds, voices and music from the different regional and global summit locations to create a true world symphony, the very first of its kind. The project is designed to explore and promote wellbeing by weaving together the unique sounds that the different cultures and places around the world select to explore the journey of wellbeing for individuals, organisations, communities, societies and for the planet. “Wellbeing of the World – A Global Symphony” will culminate at the 2025 Global Wellbeing Summit, with a headline musical performance that brings together this collective and global artistic expression of wellbeing, and will also be expressed in a first-ever, AI-generated “flowing symphony” that will constantly evolve, inviting sonic input and listener preference far into the future..
Throughout the two-year journey, local communities from all the Regional and Global Wellbeing Summit locations will be invited to help create this collective story, using software specially designed at the MIT Media Lab. Sounds can come from professional musicians and amateurs, from people of all ages and backgrounds, and from anything in the environment (human-created or not) that conveys a vivid sense of place and of purpose. As the sounds are collected, using research currently underway at the MIT Media Lab and under Tod Machover’s creative supervision, the process will combine, contrast and coordinate them to dramatize individual voices as well as collective harmony. The result will be an ever-changing musical piece: the Wellbeing of the World Symphony, a sonic portrait of wellbeing around the world.
About Tod Machover
Tod Machover, composer and inventor, is Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music & Media at the MIT Media Lab, where he is also Director of the Opera of the Future Group and Academic Head.
He has been called “America’s most wired composer” by The Los Angeles Times, and “a musical visionary” by The New York Times, and is widely celebrated for inventing new technologies that expand music’s potential for emotional expression, for creating community, and for enhancing health and wellbeing.
Tod Machover’s work has been awarded numerous prizes and honors from organizations such as the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fromm and Koussevitzky music foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, the German and French ministries of culture, the World Technology Network, and Musical America (that named him Composer of the Year in 2016). He has been commissioned and performed by many of the world’s most prominent cultural organizations, including Yo-Yo Ma, the Pompidou Center (Paris), the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Opéra de Monte-Carlo, The Kronos Quartet, and many others. Machover is especially recognized for his groundbreaking operas, including the audience-interactive Brain Opera, the “robotic” Death and the Powers (Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), and his current opera project, The Overstory, based on Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize winning novel about trees and the urgency of recalibrating the relationship between humans and the non-human world.
