Personal Opera

Personal Opera is a radically innovative creative environment that enables anyone to create musical masterpieces sharing one’s deepest thoughts, feelings, and memories. Based on our design of—and experience with—Hyperscore, we are developing a totally new environment to allow the incorporation of personal stories, images, and both original and well-loved music and sounds. This development is based on two guiding principles: first, that active music creation yields far more powerful benefits than passive listening; and second, that increasing customization of the musical experience is both desirable and possible, as evidenced in our group’s development of Personal Instruments (see Music, Mind, and Health) and Personal Music. Personal Opera goes a step further, using music as the medium for assembling and conveying our own individual legacies, representing a new form of archiving, easy to use and powerful to experience.