Dr. Matthias Röder is an award-winning music tech visionary whose work bridges classical music, emerging technology and creative leadership. He is the director of the Beethoven AI project and serves as co-founder and managing partner at The Mindshift, a consultancy on creative leadership and innovation strategy. Dr. Röder is also managing director of the Eliette and Herbert von Karajan Institute and a board member of the Karajan Foundation, as well as a trustee of the Mozarteum Foundation. He founded the Karajan Music Tech Conference, a cross-industry event promoting breakthrough technologies in music, media and audio, and launched the “Classical Music Hack Day” series. Together with his partner, Seda Röder, he co-founded the Sonophilia Foundation, a non-profit that supports and promotes scientific research into creativity.
His contributions have earned numerous accolades, including an Effie Bronze for the AI-based completion of Beethoven’s 10th Symphony and the “Game Changer” Award from the Chamber of Commerce Salzburg. A sought-after speaker and lecturer, Dr. Röder has taught at Harvard University, the Change & Innovation Management Program at the University of St. Gall, and Salzburg University. He holds a PhD in music from Harvard and is an alumnus of the Mozarteum University Salzburg.
In an interview with the NYC Daily Post, Dr. Röder delves into his philosophy of creativity, the cultural impact of artificial intelligence and how music can become a multisensory, globally collaborative experience.
Q: With such a multifaceted career spanning academia, innovation, and leadership, how do you integrate these experiences to shape your vision for the future of music, technology and creativity?
A: My approach to integrating these diverse experiences stems from a fundamental realization I had early in my career: creativity needs automation and systematization. When I first learned programming at age twenty, I discovered that for every creative idea we have, we must define how it can be implemented in an automated fashion. This principle now guides all my work across the Karajan Institute, The Mindshift, and our various initiatives.
The key insight is moving beyond mere execution to focus on creation and process-thinking so that execution can be done in an automated fashion. This liberates entrepreneurs and fuels innovation. Whether we’re developing AI applications for music interpretation at the Karajan Institute or consulting on creative leadership through The Mindshift, the underlying philosophy remains consistent: automate the repetitive to amplify the creative.
Q: After completing your PhD at Harvard, what drew you back to Europe, and how has your international experience influenced your vision for initiatives like the Karajan Institute and The Mindshift?
A: After completing my PhD at Harvard, where I founded the world’s first Digital Musicology Research Group, I was drawn back to Europe by the opportunity to bridge the gap between cutting-edge academic research and practical applications in the classical music world. My international experience taught me that human adaptability and technology work best when combined with deep cultural understanding.
The Harvard experience gave me the methodological rigor needed to approach creativity scientifically, while my European roots provided the cultural context essential for initiatives like the Karajan Institute. This combination allows us to honor musical heritage while pushing technological boundaries. The success of our virtual Karajan Music Tech Conference, which attracted visitors from 70 countries and 10 times more visitors than in the real world, demonstrates how international perspective can scale local innovations globally.
Q: The Beethoven X project used AI to complete Beethoven’s unfinished 10th Symphony by analyzing his sketches and style and generating new musical material, refined with human input. AI became not only a tool but also a collaborator. What do you see as the biggest challenges and opportunities in combining AI with human artistry?
A: The Beethoven X project revealed that the biggest challenge isn’t technical — it’s cultural. Cultural conservatives argued to exclude AI from entering the genius-oriented realm of creativity, with critics calling our work “sacrilege.” This resistance stems from misunderstanding AI’s role as a creative partner rather than a replacement.
The greatest opportunity lies in recognizing that AI systems, much like DJs, reinterpret and arrange existing musical material, facilitating a collaborative creative process. Our Beethoven AI gave us options we could never have produced in such a timeframe, expanding our horizons, providing freedom of choice and saving time for focusing on what truly matters. AI can democratize creativity, enabling more people to engage in innovative processes rather than replacing human creativity.
Q: You’ve described how AI, as in the Beethoven AI project, expands creativity by offering new options, breaking conventions, and saving time for deeper exploration. Yet, you also note a reluctance in organizations to embrace AI due to fear of failure or competition with machines. How can we foster the courage and cultural shift needed to embrace AI as a partner in creativity?
A: The reluctance stems from what I call a business-as-usual mentality and fearing failure that’s omnipresent in organizations. Many treat humans like computers rather than recognizing our unique strengths. The solution requires a fundamental mindset shift.
We need to focus on raising first-class creative and collaborative thinkers, learners and inventors, rather than programming what are essentially second-class calculators. Humans excel at empathy, creativity and unleashing the potential of tools around us. Organizations must create environments where hierarchy kills innovation is recognized and avoided, allowing ideas to bounce and collide without stifling layers of authority.
Q: You’ve spoken about the shift toward an “Age of Creativity” and the need to unleash technology’s potential for the greater good, highlighting that only 0.02% of the global population works in creativity-related fields. How can AI and technology democratize creativity and innovation, and what steps can we take to ensure these tools empower a broader population?
A: The statistic that only 0.02% of the entire world population works in any innovation and creativity-related field represents a massive waste of human potential. This cannot reflect true human capacity — it’s a systemic failure.
AI can democratize creativity by removing traditional barriers to entry. Just as my early programming experience showed that automating execution frees time for creativity, modern AI tools enable broader participation in creative processes. The key is developing intrinsic value creating networks — groups working toward shared goals where value created by these networks will be distributed amongst participants. This approach, emerging in the Gen Z generation, will find models in open source development and non-profit organizations.
Q: In an era where traditional education struggles to foster creativity, how could music play a central role in reshaping learning systems to better prepare future generations?
A: Music offers a unique pathway for educational reform because it naturally integrates emotional and rational thinking. Traditional education focuses on industrial age thinking, valuing skills and knowledge but not sufficiently emphasizing exploration of the unknown, experimentation and problem solving.
Music education can demonstrate how creativity scales through technology. Our work developing intelligent musical instruments where sensors communicate with computers that analyze and provide real-time feedback transforms learning from periodic lessons to continuous, adaptive experiences. This model could revolutionize education by making learning more interactive, personalized and creativity-focused.
Q: You spoke at IFA Berlin about music as a “compressed world experience” and how combining human and machine intelligence can broaden our perception and creative capacity. What concrete actions can organizations take to adopt this mindset effectively and how do you envision this approach scaling beyond music to influence education, business and other creative industries?
A: Organizations can adopt this mindset by recognizing that the focus on execution in modern management theory is a fetish of industrial age thinking. Instead, they should prioritize creation and process-thinking, allowing execution to be automated.
Concrete actions include putting managers, technologists and musicians in one room and exploring theoretical options without parameters, giving leeway where standard operating procedures otherwise set the tone and pursuing ideas with business acumen. This cross-disciplinary collaboration, combined with reduced hierarchy, enables breakthrough innovations that can scale beyond music to any creative industry.
Q: The Karajan Institute has been a leader in exploring the profound effects of music on the human body and mind, preserving Herbert von Karajan’s legacy while driving innovative research. In your work on “Music and Dementia,” what promising insights have you uncovered about how music can support cognitive function and emotional well-being in individuals with dementia?
A: Our research at the Karajan Institute focuses on how music has a positive influence on the vegetative nervous system and can reduce postoperative pain perception. We develop intelligent audio technologies that create personalized audio mixes adapted to individual hearing capabilities — essentially creating “glasses for the ears.”
Q: If you could collaborate with any historical figure — composer, scientist, or technologist — using today’s tools, who would it be and what kind of project would you create together?
A: I would choose to collaborate with Herbert von Karajan himself, using today’s AI and immersive technologies. Karajan was highly visionary when it came to technology and believed that one day the sound of an orchestra could be reproduced perfectly in a recording.
With modern AI, machine learning, and spatial audio technologies, we could fulfill his original vision while pushing beyond it. We could create truly revolutionary musical experiences that combine his interpretive genius with today’s technological capabilities, potentially developing new forms of musical expression that bridge the gap between live performance and recorded media in ways he could only dream of.
Q: In a future where music is not only heard but also fully experienced through all five senses, what innovative technologies or methods would you explore to achieve this multisensory engagement?
A: Building on our work with Dolby Atmos technology to simulate orchestra halls in cinemas, where we calculate sound-run-time between the orchestra and walls and send sound to more than 60 speakers in precise timing, the future involves expanding beyond audio.
I would explore haptic feedback systems that translate musical dynamics into tactile sensations, visual technologies that respond to harmonic progressions and rhythmic patterns, and even controlled scent systems that enhance emotional responses to different musical passages. The goal is creating immersive environments where music becomes a full-body, multi-sensory experience rather than just an auditory one.
Q: Given the accelerating pace of brain-computer interface development, how do you think music might evolve if we could compose and share it directly from thought to thought?
A: Direct thought-to-thought musical communication would represent the ultimate realization of collective creativity. This technology could enable what I call open tribes to collaborate on musical creation in unprecedented ways, where intrinsic motivation outweighs financial incentives and creative ideas flow freely between minds.
Such evolution could lead to entirely new forms of musical expression where the boundaries between composer, performer and audience dissolve into collaborative creative networks. Music could become a direct language of emotion and thought, bypassing traditional notation and performance constraints.
Q: If given unlimited resources, what is one bold, unconventional experiment you would undertake to redefine how music is created, experienced, or understood?
A: With unlimited resources, I would create a global network demonstrating increased importance of collective creativity aimed at solving big problems. This experiment would use music as both a communication medium and a problem-solving tool, connecting musicians, technologists and scientists worldwide to address major challenges.
The project would explore how people work in large networks towards common goals, putting less emphasis on personal value creation, potentially pioneering new forms of collaborative creativity that could revolutionize how we approach complex global issues through artistic and technological integration.
Q: Building on your experience with Beethoven X, how would you structure a performance in a world where AI and humans co-compose symphonies in real-time based on live audience emotional feedback? What do you think such a performance could teach us about the relationship between artists and audiences?
A: Such a performance would embody the principle that technology combined with creativity is an essential catalyst. The structure would involve AI systems continuously analyzing audience biometric data — heart rate, facial expressions, brain activity — while human composers and AI collaboratively respond in real-time.
This would teach us that the relationship between artists and audiences is fundamentally interactive and co-creative. Rather than passive consumption, audiences become active participants in the creative process. The performance would demonstrate how collective creativity can emerge from the intersection of human intuition, technological capability and shared emotional experience, potentially revealing new forms of artistic expression that emerge only through this unique collaboration.
In a world where the boundaries between human and machine creativity continue to blur, Dr. Matthias Röder offers a grounded yet visionary voice. Rather than seeing AI as a threat, he sees it as an amplifier — of imagination, collaboration and access. Whether designing multisensory musical experiences, exploring music’s therapeutic power or building networks that rethink how we learn and innovate, Röder’s work invites us to engage with technology not as a final destination, but as a catalyst and collaborative partner in the ongoing journey of cultural evolution.
More information about Dr. Matthias Röder and his initiatives can be found at his website, as well as on the official websites of the Karajan Institute, the Sonophilia Foundation and The Mindshift, in addition to their respective social media channels.
Featured image: Photo by Philipp Gladsome
Edited by Steven London & James Sutton
