Growing up in Mexico and Texas, Mariano Salcedo ’25 couldn’t readily indulge his passion for creating music. “There are no bands in Mexican public schools,” he says. While some families could pay for instruments and lessons, others, like Salcedo’s, were less fortunate.
“I’ve always loved music,” he continues. “I was a listener.”
Salcedo, the Alex Rigopulos (1992) Fellow in Music Technology and Computation, earned an BS in Artificial Intelligence and Decision Making from MIT, where he explored signal processing in machine learning and how a classical understanding of signals can inform how we understand AI. Now he’s one of five master’s students in the Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program’s inaugural cohort.
The program, directed by professor of the practice in music technology Eran Egozy ’93, MNG ’95, is a collaboration between the Music and Theater Arts Section in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), and the School of Engineering. It invites practitioners to study, discover, and develop new computational approaches to music. It also includes a speaker series that exposes students and the broader MIT community to music industry professionals, artists, technologists, and other researchers.
Rigopulos ’92, SM ’94 is a video game designer, musician, and former CEO of Harmonix Music Systems, a company he co-founded with Egozy in 1995. Harmonix is now a part of Epic Games, where Rigopulos is the director of game development music.
“MIT is where I was first able to pursue my passion for music technology decades ago, and that experience was the springboard for a long and fulfilling career,” says Rigopulos. “So, when MIT launched an advanced degree program in music technology, I was thrilled to fund a fellowship to help propel this exciting new program.”
Salcedo’s research focuses on neural cellular automata (NCA), which merges classical cellular automata with machine learning techniques to grow images that can regenerate. When paired with a stimulus like music, these images can “show” sounds in action.
“This approach enables anyone to create music-driven visuals while leveraging the expressive and sometimes unpredictable dynamics of self-organized systems,” Salcedo says. Through the web interface Salcedo designed, users can adjust the relationship between the music’s energy and the NCA system to create unique visual performances using any music audio stream.
“I want the visuals to complement and elevate the listening experience,” he says.
Egozy is enthusiastic about Salcedo’s work and his commitment to further exploring its possibilities. “He is a beautiful example of a multidisciplinary researcher who thinks deeply about how to best use technology to enhance and expand human creativity,” he says.
Salcedo has been selected to deliver the student address at the 2026 Advanced Degree Ceremony for SHASS. “It’s an honor, and it’s daunting,” he says. “It feels like a huge responsibility,” though one he’s eager to embrace. His selection also pleases Egozy. “I am super excited that Mariano was chosen to deliver this year’s keynote,” he enthuses.
Changing gears
Salcedo began his MIT journey as a mechanical engineering (MechE) student, applying to MIT through the Questbridge program. “I heard if you like engineering and science that attending MIT would be a great choice,” he recalls. “Nerds are welcomed and embraced.” While he dutifully worked toward completing his MechE curriculum, music and technology came calling after a chance encounter with a large language model (LLM).
“I was introduced to an LLM chatbot and was blown away,” he recalls. “This was something that was speaking to me. I was both awed and frightened.” After his encounter with the chatbot, Salcedo switched his major from mechanical engineering to artificial intelligence and decision-making.
“I basically started over, after being two-thirds of the way through the MechE curriculum,” he says. He learned about the possibilities available with AI but also confronted some of the challenges bedeviling researchers and developers, including its potential power, ensuring its responsible use, human bias, limited access for people from underrepresented groups, and a lack of diversity among developers. He decided he might be able to change that picture.
“I thought, one more person in the field could make a difference,” he says.
While completing his undergraduate studies, Salcedo’s love of music resurfaced. “I began DJing at MIT and was hooked,” he says. While he hadn’t learned to play a traditional instrument, he discovered he could create engaging soundscapes with technology. “I bought a digital audio work station to help me make music,” he continues.
Egozy and Salcedo met in 2024, while Salcedo completed an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program rotation as a game developer in Egozy’s lab. “He was incredibly curious and has grown tremendously over a very short time period,” Egozy says. Egozy became an informal, although important, mentor to Salcedo. “He brings great energy and thoughtfulness to his work, and to supporting others in the [music technology and computation graduate] program,” Egozy notes.
Salcedo also took a class with Egozy, 21M.385/21M.585/6.4450 (Interactive Music Systems), which further fed his appetite for the creativity he craved while also allowing him to indulge his fascination with music’s possibilities. By taking advantage of courses in the SHASS curriculum, he further developed his understanding of music theory and related technologies.
“I took a class with professor Leslie Tilley, 21M.240 (Critically Thinking in Music), which helped establish a valuable framework for understanding music making,” he says, “while a class like 6.3000 (Signal Processing) helped me connect intuition with science.”
Working across disciplines
While Salcedo is passionate about his music and his research, he’s also invested in building relationships with his fellow students. He’s a member of the fraternity Sigma Nu, where he says he “found a home and community.” He also took a MISTI trip to Chile in summer 2023, where he conducted music technology research. Salcedo praises the culture of camaraderie at MIT and is grateful for its influence on his work as a scholar. “MIT has taught me how to learn,” he says.
Professors encouraged him to present his research and findings. He presented his work — Artificial Dancing Intelligence: Neural Cellular Automata for Visual Performance of Music — at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference in Singapore in January 2026.
Salcedo believes his research can potentially move beyond music visualization. “What if we could improve the ways we model self-organized systems?” he asks. “That is, systems like multicellular organisms, flocks of birds, or societies that interact locally but exhibit interesting behaviors.” Any system, Salcedo says, where the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Developing the technology used to design his application can potentially help answer important ethical questions regarding AI’s continued expansion and growth. The path to his work’s development is both daunting and lonely, but those challenges feed his work ethic.
“It’s intimidating to pursue this path when the academy is currently focused on LLMs,” he says. “But it’s also important to explain and explore the base technology before digging into more nuanced work, which can help audiences understand it better.” Knowing that he has the support of his professors helps Salcedo maintain excitement for his ideas. “They only ask that we ground our interests in research,” he says.
His investigations are impacting his work as a musician. “My music has gotten more interesting because of the classes I’m taking,” he says. He’s also interested in understanding whose music the academy and the world hears, exploring biases toward Western music in the canon and exploring how to reduce biases related to which kinds of music are valued.
“The work we do as technologists is far less subjective than we’re led to believe,” he believes.
Salcedo is especially grateful for the support he’s received during his time at MIT. “Program faculty encourage a variety of pursuits,” he says, “and ask us to advance our individual aims, rather than focusing on theirs.” During his time in the graduate program, he notes with enthusiasm how often he’s been challenged to pursue his ideas.
Ultimately, Salcedo wants people to experience the joy he feels working at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences. Music and technology impact nearly everyone. Inviting audiences into his laboratory as participants in the creative and research processes offers the same kind of satisfaction he gets from crafting a great beat or solving for a thorny technical challenge. Helping audiences understand his work’s value fuels his drive to succeed.
“I want users to feel movement and explore sounds and their impact more fully,” he says.
