In the mid-1980s, composer Tod Machover found a copy of the science fiction novel “VALIS” by Philip K. Dick in a Parisian bookstore. Based on a mystical vision that Dick called his “pink light experience,” “VALIS” was an acronym for “vast active living intelligence system.” The metaphysical novel would become the basis for Machover’s eponymous opera, which first premiered at the Center Pompidou in 1987 and was recently restaged at MIT for a new generation.
At the time, Machover was in his twenties and director of music research at the renowned French Institute IRCAM, a cutting-edge hotbed known for its pioneering research in music technology. The Pompidou, says Machover, had given him carte blanche to create a new piece for his tenth anniversary. So, over the summer and fall, the composer set about building an elaborate theater inside the center’s cavernous entrance hall, installing speakers and hundreds of video monitors.
Creating the first computer opera
Machover, who is now the Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media and director of the MIT Media Lab’s Opera of the Future research group, had originally wanted to use IRCAM founder Pierre Boulez’s Ensemble Intercontemporain, but was rejected when he asked to rehearse with them for two full months. “Like a rock band,” she says. “I came back and thought, ‘Well, what’s the smallest number of players that can create and generate the richness and layered complexity of the music I was thinking about?’”
He decided that his orchestra would consist of only two musicians: a keyboardist and a percussionist. With tools like personal computers, MIDI, and the DX7 newly available, the possibilities of digital sound and intelligent interaction were beginning to expand. Soon, Machover took over as a founding faculty member of MIT’s Media Lab, shuttling between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Paris. “That’s when we invented hyperinstruments,” Machover says. The hyperinstruments, developed at the Media Lab in collaboration with Machover’s first graduate student, RA Joe Chung, allowed the musician to control a much fuller range of sound. At that time, he says, “no serious composer was using real-time computer instruments for concert music.”
Word spread at IRCAM that Machover’s opera was, to say the least, unusual. During December 1987, “VALIS” premiered to packed houses in Paris, eliciting applause and groans of horror. “It was really controversial,” says Machover, “it really touched people. It was like, ‘Wow, we’ve never heard anything like this.’ It has melody, harmonies and rhythms in a way that new music shouldn’t have.’” “VALIS” existed somewhere between an orchestra and a rock band, the purely acoustic dissolving into the electric as the opera progressed. In today’s remix era, audiences might be used to a mix of musical styles, but this hybrid approach was new. Machover, who trained as a cellist as well as playing bass in rock bands, has always borrowed freely from high and low, classical and rock, human and synthetic, acoustic and high-tech, combining parts to create new all.
The story of Dick’s philosophical novel is itself a study of fragments, of the divided self, as the main character, Phil, confronts his fictional double, Horselover Fat, while embarking on a hallucinatory spiritual quest following the suicide of a friend. At the time Dick wrote, the term artificial intelligence had not yet achieved widespread use. And yet, in “VALIS,” he combines ideas about ai and mysticism to explore questions of existence. In Dick’s vision, “VALIS” was the grand unifying theory that connected a wide range of seemingly disparate ideas. “To him, that’s what God was: this complex technological system,” Machover says, “His big question was: Is it possible that technology is the answer?” Is it possible that something is the answer or am I just lost? He was looking for something that could reconnect him with the world and reconnect the parts of his personality, and he imagined a technology to do it.”
A performance for the contemporary era
A full production of “VALIS” has not been mounted in more than 30 years, but it is an appropriate time to reintroduce the opera as Dick’s original vision of the living artificial intelligence system, as well as the hopes for its promise and the fears about his traps—seems increasingly prescient. The new performance was developed at MIT over the last few years with funding from the MIT Center for Art, Science and technology, among other sources. Presented at the MIT Theater Building W97, the production stars baritone Davóne Tines and mezzo-soprano Anaïs Reno. They were also joined by vocalists Timur Bekbosunov, David Cushing, Maggie Finnegan, Rose Hegele and Kristin Young, as well as pianist and keyboardist Julia Carey and multi-percussionist Maria Finkelmeier. New ai-enhanced technologies, created and performed by Max Addae, Emil Droga, Nina Masuelli, Manaswi Mishra and Ana Schon, were developed in the MIT Media Lab’s Opera of the Future group, which runs Machover.
At MIT, Machover collaborated with theater director Jay Scheib, Class of 1949 Professor of Music and Theater Arts, whose augmented reality theater productions have long investigated the confusing boundary between simulation and the real. “We take live action images, process the signal and then project it again, like a strange film, on a variety of surfaces, both TV and screen, but also diaphonous and translucent,” says Scheib, “It’s a lot and a lot of images that build up at a really high speed and a mix of cinematic and operatic choreography and acting styles.” On an innovative set designed by Oana Botez, lighting by Yuki Link, and media by Peter A. Torpey PhD ’13, the actors They played multiple characters as time fragments and refracts. “Reality is constantly changing,” says Scheib.
As the opera progressed toward the hallucinatory finale, becoming progressively disorienting, a computer music composer named Mini, originally played by Machover, appeared, conjuring the angelic hologram Sophia that brings Phil/Fat to a state of wholeness. In the opera’s libretto, Mini is described as “sculpting sound” rather than simply playing the keyboard, “activating musical structures with a quick movement of his hand; he seemed to be playing the orchestra of the future.” Machover composed Mini’s section beforehand in the original production, but the contemporary interpretation used a custom ai model, fed with Machover’s own compositions, to create new music in real time. “It’s not exactly an instrument. “It’s a living system that is explored during the performance,” says Machover, “It’s like a system that Mini could have actually built.”
While developing the project last spring, the Opera of the Future group struggled with the question: How would Mini “realize” the system? “Because this is live, it’s real, we wanted it to feel fresh and new, and not just be someone waving their hands in the air,” Machover says. One day, Nina Masuelli ’23, who had just finished her undergraduate studies at MIT, brought a large clear plastic jar into the lab. The group experimented by applying sensors to the jar and then connected it to the artificial intelligence system. As Mini manipulates the jar, the machine’s music responds in turn. “It’s incredibly magical,” says Machover. “It is this new type of object that allows you to explore and form a living system right in front of you. It is different every time and each time makes me smile with joy when something unexpected is revealed.”
As the performance approached, and Machover watched Masuelli continue sculpting sound with the hollow jug, with a string of Christmas lights coiled inside, something occurred to him: “Why aren’t you Mini?”
In some ways, in the age of ChatGPT and DALL-E, Mini’s exchange with the ai system is symbolic of humanity’s broader dance with artificial intelligence, as we experiment with ways of existing and creating alongside her: an ongoing enterprise that will eventually be for the next generation to explore. Writing thousands of lengthy pages in what he called his “exegesis,” Philip K. Dick spent the rest of his life after his “pink light experience” trying to make sense of a universe “transformed by information.” . Although the many questions raised by “VALIS”: Is technology the answer? – may never be fully explained, says Machover, “you can feel them through the music.”
Apparently, the public felt the same. As one critic wrote, “‘VALIS’ is an operatic feat.” All three shows were packed to capacity, with long waiting lists, and the response was tremendously enthusiastic.
“It has been deeply gratifying to see that “VALIS” has captured the imagination of a new group of amazing creative collaborators and performers, of brilliant students of invention and artists, and of a wonderfully diverse audience in ages and backgrounds,” says Machover. “This is partly due to the visionary nature of Philip K. Dick’s novel (much of which is even more relevant today than when the book and opera first appeared). I hope it also reflects some of the musical vitality and richness of the score, which seems as fresh to me as when I composed it more than 35 years ago. “I am truly delighted that “VALIS” is back and I hope it is here to stay!”
