Although the distribution of recorded music went digital with the introduction of the compact disc in the early 1980s, technology has had a large impact on the way music is made and recorded as well. At the most basic level, the invention of MIDI ( Musical Instrument Digital Interface), a language enabling computers and sound synthesizers to talk to each other, has given individual musicians powerful tools with which to make music. “The MIDI interface enabled basement musicians to gain power which had been available only in expensive recording studios,” One expert observed. “It enables synthesis of sounds that have never existed before, and storage and subsequent simultaneous replay and mixing of multiple sound tracks. Using a moderately powerful desktop computer running a music composition program and a 500 synthesizer, any musically literate person can write -- and play! -- a string quartet in an afternoon.' Whereas many musicians use computers as a tool in composing or producing music, Tod Machover uses computers to design the instruments and environments that produce his music. As a professor of music and media at the MIT Media Lab, Machover has pioneered hyper - instruments: hybrids of computers and musical instruments that allow users to create sounds simply by raising their hands, pointing with a 'virtual baton,' or moving their entire body in a 'sensor chair.' Similar work on a 'virtual orchestra' is being done by Geoffrey Wright, head of the computer music program at John Hopkins University's Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, Maryland. Wright uses conductors' batons that emit infrared light beams to generate data about the speed and direction of the batons, data that can then be translated by computers into instructions for a synthesizer to produce music. In Machover's best -known musical work, Brain Opera (1996), 125 people interact with each other and a group of hyper - instruments to produce sounds that can be blended into a musical performance. The final opera is assembled from these sound fragments, material contributed by people on the Web, and Machover's own music. Machover says he is motivated to give people 'an active, directly participatory relationship with music.' More recently, Machover helped design the Meteorite Museum, a remarkable underground museum that opened in June 1998 in Essen, Germany. Visitors approach the museum through a glass atrium, open an enormous door, enter a cave, and then descend by ramps into various multimedia rooms. Machover com- posed the music and designed many of the interactions for these rooms. In the Transflow Room, the undulating walls are covered with 100 rubber pads shaped like diamonds. 'By hitting the pads you can make and shape a sound and images in the room. Brain Opera was an ensemble of individual instruments, while the Transflow Room is a single instrument played by 40 people. The room blends the reactions and images of the group.' Machover's projects at MIT include Music Toys and Toys of Tomorrow, which are creating devices that he hopes will eventually make a Toy Symphony possible, Machover describes one of the toys as an embroidered ball the size of a small pumpkin with ridges on the outside and miniature speakers inside. “We've recently figured out how to send digital information through fabric or thread,” he said. “So the basic idea is to squeeze the ball and where you squeeze and where you place your fingers will affect the sound produced. You can also change the pitch to high or low, or harmonize with other balls.” Computer music has a long way to go before it wins mass acceptance, however. Martin Goldsmith, host of National Public Radio' s Performance Today, explains why: 'I think that a reason a great moving piece of computer music hash' t been written yet is that -- in this instance -- the technology stands between the creator and the receptor and prevents a real human connect