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People  •  Music  •  Assistant Professor

Rébecca Kleinberger

Departments

Music

Education

  • Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • MS in Media Arts and Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • MRes in Virtual Environment Imaging and Visualization, University College London
  • MEng, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts et Métiers ParisTech Graduate School
  • BS in Mathematics and Engineering, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts et Métiers ParisTech

Awards

  • 2021 – Deshpande Grant for breakthrough technologies commercialization ($150,000)
  • 2020 – Deshpande Grant for breakthrough technologies commercialization ($50,000)
  • 2020 – McGovern Institute Neurotechnology (MINT) grant to develop new technologies for brain research ($100,000)
  • 2018 – First Prize in the Technical Usability category at MIT ATHACK (Assistive Technology Hackathon) for the Cipods project
  • 2017 – Director’s Grant from the Council for the Arts at MIT, Digital Spa project ($1,000)
  • 2017 – Bill Mitchell Design Award for Connected Care, sponsored by BNP Paribas Cardiff, MIT ($4,000)
  • 2013 – 2020 – International Fellowship (for service and mentoring of undergraduate community on international questions), MIT
  • 2017 – Graduate Woman of Excellence Award, MIT
  • 2016 – Director’s Grant from the Council for the Arts at MIT, Fablur project
  • 2016 – 2nd Prize for Entertainment and Audience award, Virtual Reality Hackathon, PitchPaint project
  • 2012 – Magnes Scholarship, Paris
  • 2011 – SOCE Grant, Paris
  • 2020 – First Prize “2084 a brave new world?” ENSTA-ParisTech writing contest organized by the CEA (Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique), Paris
  • 2010 – Prix d’Excellence Scientifique et Technique, from Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts et Métiers ParisTech Graduate School, Lilles

Rébecca Kleinberger, PhD, is a creative technologist and researcher and is jointly appointed at College of Arts, Media and Design and Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Her work leverages the hidden potential of the voice to create new experiences that span from assistive technology to vocal experiences design, including inner-voice and interspecies interactions. Her research connects various fields, including human-computer interaction, computer science, music technology, digital signal processing, wearable computing, AI, neurology, psychology, and animal-computer interaction. She aims to raise awareness of the richness of the voice beyond words and the potential of using the voice to access the mind.

After completing her Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab on the future of voice technology, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, developing music-based voice feedback systems for creative and therapeutic applications. She also holds a Master in Engineering from École National des Arts et Métiers Paris, a Master in Computer Graphics from UCL, and a Master in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT.

She has collaborated with various research and corporate institutions from the San Diego Zoo, to Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Microsoft Research, Google Magenta, Google Arts and Culture, HARMAN, and Bose. Rébecca has published in leading academic venues, including CHI, SIGGRAPH, UIST, NIME, and TEI. She is part of the OtherAbility artist collective working on assistive technology for museums. Her installation works have appeared at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, Le Laboratoire Paris, and Harvard Divinity School. Her research has also been deployed as part of large-scale musical productions and novel esthetic experiences at Carnegie Hall, the Philadelphia Symphony, the Maison Symphonique de Montreal, the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland, and the Winspear Opera House in Dallas. Her work has also been featured in media channels such as TED.com, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Engadget, Financial Times Magazine, and 60 Minutes.

Research/Publications Highlights

  • Interspecies Interactions Mediated by Technology: An Avian Case Study at the Zoo,
    R. Kleinberger, A. Harrington, L. Yu, A. van Troyer, D. Su, J. Baker, G. Miller
    CHI’20: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Honolulu, USA, 2020
  • Fluency Effects of Novel Acoustic Vocal Transformations in People Who Stutter: An Exploratory Behavioral Study
    R. Kleinberger, G. Stefanakis, S. Ghosh, T. Machover, M. Erkkinen SNL’19: Society for the Neurobiology of Language, Helsinki, Finland, 2019
  • Supporting Elder Connectedness through Cognitively Sustainable De- sign Interactions with the Memory Music Box R. Kleinberger, A. Rieger, J. Sands and J. Baker, UIST’19: User Interface Software and Technology, New Orleans, LA, USA, 2019
  • From Mondrian to Modular Synth: Rendering NIME using Generative Adversarial Networks
    A. Van Troyer and R. Kleinberger, NIME’19: New Interface for Musical Expression, Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2019
  • Speech Companions: Evaluating the Effects of Musically Modulated Auditory Feedback on the Voice
    R. Kleinberger, G. Stefanakis, and S. Franjou
    ICAD’19: The 25th International Conference on Auditory Display, UK, Northumbria University, June 2019
  • SNaSI: Social Navigation through Subtle Interactions with an AI agent
    R. Kleinberger, J. Huburn, M. Grayson and C. Morrison
    RTD’19: Research Through Design, Delft, Netherlands 2019
  • Digitally Enchanted Wear: A Novel Approach in the Field of Dresses as Dynamic Displays
    R. Kleinberger, A. Panjwani
    TEI’18: International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interactions, Stock- holm, Sweden 2018

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