Neil Gershenfeld

And eventually he was kicked out and invented electronic music.

David Borden was the first musician who created electronic music.

So he's legendary for people like Phil Glass and Steve Reich.

And so that got me thinking about I would behave as a scientist in the music department, in the physics department, but not in the music department.

Got me thinking about what's the computational capacity of a musical instrument.

And through Marvin, he introduced me to Todd Backover at the Media Lab, who is just about to start a project with Yo-Yo Ma that led to a collaboration to instrument a cello, to extract Yo-Yo's data and bring it out into computational environments.

Yeah.

So...

One part of that is to understand the computing.

If you look at the finest time scale and length scale you need to model the physics, it's not heroic.

A good GPU can do teraflops today.

That used to be a national class supercomputer, now it's just a GPU.

That's about, if you take the time scales and length scales relevant for the physics, that's about the scale of the physics computing.

For Yo-Yo, what was really driving it was he's completely unsentimental about the Strad.

It's not that it makes some magical wiggles in the sound wave.

It's performance as a controller, how he can manipulate it as an interface device.

Interface between what and what exactly?

Hymn and sound.

Okay.

And so what it led to was I had started by thinking about ops per second, but Yo-Yo's question was really...