About | Center for Music Technology

Students working with computers and equipment.

About the Center:
Changing the Way We Create and Experience Music

The Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology (GTCMT) is an international center for creative and technological research in music, focusing on the development and deployment of innovative musical technologies.

Our vision is twofold: to transform the ways in which we create and experience music, and to create the next generation of technology for musical composition, performance, consumption, and education.

Our mission: to provide a framework for students, faculty, and researchers to apply their musical, technological, and scientific creativity to the development of innovative musical and technological artifacts.

The Center exists within the School of Music in Georgia Tech's College of Design. Faculty and students at the Center have backgrounds in music, engineering, computer science, and acoustics, among a variety of other disciplines. Our goal is to combine our musical, technological, and scientific research to create rich and expressive experiences for composers, performers, and audiences.

Areas of interest include education, robotic musicianship, machine learning, digital signal processing, musical informatics, new interfaces for music expression, sonification, acoustics, music cognition, mobile music, interactive music, and networked music, among others.

Over the years we have developed robotic musicians such as Shimon that can listen to, understand, create, and improvise music; tools such as Earsketch that support learning to code by making music; novel algorithms that enable new ways of producing, accessing, and enjoying digital music; acoustic research that bridges the fields of music, engineering, and technology; body augmentation for musicians such as the Robotic Drumming Prosthetic; and new musical instruments as featured in our annual international Guthman Musical Instrument Competition.

Our History

The Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology was established in 2009 by a core group of music technology faculty joined by faculty from colleges around the Georgia Tech campus, including computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences.

The Center was the vision of founding Director Gil Weinberg. He and his colleagues aimed to establish the Center for Music Technology as a leading international center for creative and technological research in music. To achieve this goal, faculty have focused on recruiting top students, raising research funds, establishing high visibility events such as the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, the 10-year-old Sonic Generator Ensemble in residence, and the student-organized Listening Machine concert series, now in its 12th year.

Since 2009, the Center’s faculty members have raised more than $9 million from foundations (including the National Science Foundation, National Endowment of the Arts, Arthur Blank Foundation, Georgia Research Alliance, and the Grammy Foundation), industry (including companies such as Google, Moog, Dolby and Gracenote), and internal sources such as the Provost’s Office, College of Design and the GVU center.

The Center's research projects have been presented at major music venues, broadcasts, and festivals around the world, ranging from the Times Square Arts Alliance and National Public Radio’s Performance Today to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, TED, and the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.