Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 15 minutes ago
At the Music Hackspace Boston Hackathon in June 2026, composer and technologist Rob Jaret received the MIDI Association-sponsored Most Accessible Product award for Emotional Magenta, an innovative project that explores how facial expressions and emotional input can be used to create and shape music.
Emotional Magenta is based on Google DeepMind’s Magenta Realtime 2 Collider, but Jaret’s version adds a new layer of human expression. The project uses facial analysis to assess changes in a user’s emotional state. When the detected emotion changes, that information is sent to an altered version of Collider, where an Emotional Input node changes the musical prompt and influences the generated music.
At the Music Hackspace Boston Hackathon in June 2026, composer and technologist Rob Jaret received the MIDI Association-sponsored Most Accessible Product award for Emotional Magenta, an innovative project that explores how facial expressions and emotional input can be used to create and shape music.
Emotional Magenta is based on Google DeepMind’s Magenta Realtime 2 Collider, but Jaret’s version adds a new layer of human expression. The project uses facial analysis to assess changes in a user’s emotional state. When the detected emotion changes, that information is sent to an altered version of Collider, where an Emotional Input node changes the musical prompt and influences the generated music.
