Expressing disillusionment over the "Brain Opera," Jason Spingarn-Koff
wrote:

I strongly agree with much of Jim Gasperini's review of Tod Machover's
"Brain Opera," and would like to take the critique further.

Mr. Gasperini wrote, "So my impression is of another work where you're
invited to make a difference that makes no difference."

This is perhaps *the* fatal flaw in the work. According to Machover, the
"Brain Opera" is important (important enough to cost over 4 million
dollars) because it pioneers a new class of "musical instruments" which
allow users, with little or no technical mastery of an instrument, to
create music. The hope is that such high-tech instruments will
democratize the music-making process, empowering people who, for various
reasons, are unable to learn conventional instruments.

In reality, Machover's machines do the opposite: they allow a small
group of elite programmer/musicians/intellectuals to determine what
music the masses are able to produce and hear. In "playing" the
"instruments" of the Opera, I made basically the same musical cacophony
as everyone else, no matter what I did. It was *impossible* to acquire
any skill on the instruments, because they were preprogrammed to deliver
the same notes, chords and silly samples over and over to everyone. For
example, one station (a table-top LCD screen which emoted beautiful
imagery and sound when touched) apparently played the *same* loop of
music, no matter what the user did. The imagery changed, but the music
seemed only to vary in volume. "Wow. I'm a musician!"

In general, the entire "Brain Opera" struck me as one big magic show.
Machover and his MIT colleagues wowed the poor audience with a huge bag
of high-tech tricks, giving us the impression of playing an active role,
while all of the important work was being done behind the scenes. The
"performance" section was perhaps the biggest trick of them all. The
audience sat through about an hour of cheesy, generic ambient music,
captivated by three "musicians" (magicians) waving high-tech wands, who
appeared to be making some new type of music through new types of
man-machine interfaces. Only during the following question-and-answer
session did we learn the truth: the music was all preprogrammed! The
magicians were simply controlling volume, panning, and (sometimes)
choosing which instrument voices played which lines. "Now that's an
Opera!"

G.H. Hovagimyan responded:

My father was an electrical engineer. He worked in computers and
communications. What engineers do is make tools. They figure out ways to
do things. New musical instruments have been invented in the past, such
as the clavier or electric guitar. What a musical instrument does is
enable a person to clarify and communicate their sense of life through
the instrument. We immediately recognize musical effort that is
worthwhile. My own feeling is if you put a tool into the hands of a
person who doesn't know what they are doing and doesn't need to produce
a coherent form you will end up with meaningless forms. Trying to apply
some vague sense of technocratic democracy and apply it to art, is one
of the most abysmally boring ideas to come out of the scientific
community to date. It takes an artists with something to say to produce
good art.