Paul Henry Smith

Founder and director

Paul Smith is a conductor, cellist, teacher, and entrepreneur whose path intersects the worlds of technology and music. He studied conducting under Leonard Bernstein and Gustav Meier at Tanglewood, and Sergiu Celibidache at the Curtis Institute of Music. He holds degrees in music composition, theory, and musicology from Oberlin and Brandeis.

Paul started exploring AI and music in the late 1980s at what was then the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. As a visiting researcher at MIT Paul worked with Jonathan Amsterdam to create an AI system to understand and predict how musical lines create motion. He then worked at the MIT Media Lab at the invitation of Marvin Minsky, where he helped develop and test software with Michael Hawley to play computer-controlled Bösendorfer pianos.

In the 1990s, as a founding faculty member at Harid Conservatory, Paul led the musicianship and theory curriculum. The method taught there incorporated learnings from the great maestros as well as from the earlier AI performance systems. Some of his students went on to hold principal positions at the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony, and other orchestras around the world. While at Harid, Paul advised a graduate thesis project at Florida Atlantic University on the extension of his MIT work that led to the creation of MAPLE, an AI system for analyzing and producing species counterpoint.

In the early 2010s, Yo-Yo Ma selected Paul’s AI-powered startup, Sonation, to receive funding and residency at the Harvard Innovation Lab. Later New England Conservatory president Tony Woodcock invited Sonation to be its first “startup in residence.” During his residency at NEC, Paul designed Cadenza, an iPad app that listened to musicians’ tempos and automatically accompanied them with real orchestra recordings—It even turned their pages for them! Cadenza became a best iOS app in the US, China and 19 other countries. Under the hood, musicians playing music with the app were also training on-device AI to fit their personal style of playing more and more precisely.

Paul founded Symphonic Laboratory with Andrew Heath in Boston in 2017 as a place where eager musicians could learn and refine performance methods in intensive performance workshops focused on achieving deeply moving musical experiences. The Symphonic Laboratory brings it all together: people learn and use the knowledge revealed by earlier AI research, along with rehearsal methods derived from the teaching of Bernstein and Celibidache.

Paul lives in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where he teaches, runs weekly Symphonic Laboratory workshops, and designs generative AI software for Amazon .