2023 McDermott Award Recipient Pamela Z at MIT

A pioneering composer, performer, and interdisciplinary artist for more than four decades, Pamela Z works with voice, live electronic processing, sampled sound, and video, and is known for using custom music technology activated by physical gesture to explore deeply personal themes.
As the 2022 recipient of the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT, an award that recognizes innovative talents and offers the recipient a $100,000 prize and a campus residency, artist Pamela Z came to MIT several times during the spring of 2023 and visited:
• Eran Egozy’s 21M.385/6.4550 Interactive Music Systems class, which is a hands-on programming and design course that explores audio synthesis, musical structure, HCI (human-computer interaction), and visual presentation as the ingredients for engaging real-time interactive musical experiences.
• Ian Hattwick’s 21M.370 Digital Instrument Design course, a class which covers aesthetic and technical challenges in the creation of physical interfaces for musical performance. Topics include user experience design for artistic performance, musical human-computer interaction (HCI), hardware and software standards for digital musical systems, embedded programming and sound synthesis, analog and digital sensors, rapid prototyping and digital manufacturing, and creating performance practices around custom hardware.
• Graduate research assistant Max Addae in the Opera of the Future group at the Media Lab. A researcher, vocalist, composer/arranger, and creative technologist, Addae develops interactive voice technologies for musical and creative contexts. Drawing from his experiences in vocal performance, computation, and electroacoustic composition, Addae aims to augment vocal expression and enhance the relationship between voice, technology, and embodiment.
• Evan Ziporyn’s 21M.065 Introduction to Musical Composition course investigating the sonic organization of musical works and performances, focusing on fundamental questions of unity and variety.
The McDermott Award reflects MIT’s commitment to risk-taking, problem solving, and to the idea of connecting creative minds across disciplines. The award may be given to an artist working in any field or cross-disciplinary activity and is considered an investment in the recipient’s future creative work, rather than a prize for a particular project or lifetime of achievement.
More information at: arts.mit.edu/pamela-z