As one of the first students in MIT’s new Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program, Mariano Salcedo ’25 is researching the intersection between artificial intelligence and music visuals.
Specifically, his graduate research focuses on neural cellular automata (NCA), which merges classical cellular automata with machine learning techniques to grow images that can regenerate.
When paired wit...
Salcedo's research seeks to create music-driven visuals by leveraging the expressive and sometimes unpredictable dynamics of self-organized systems. This approach could potentially move beyond music visualization to improve the ways we model self-organized systems, such as multicellular organisms, flocks of birds, or societies that interact locally but exhibit interesting behaviors. Salcedo's work has been selected for the student address at the 2026 Advanced Degree Ceremony for the School of Hu...