Spring 2025 / The Human Element

Digital Instruments for Musical Togetherness

Engineering graduate student Joseph Ntaimo ’23 builds instruments that “empower people to jam with each other”

By Ari Daniel PhD ’08

Joseph Ntaimo ’23 places a plywood box on his lap. Inside, there’s a colorful array of wires and small computer chips.

The top of the box holds four white ridges, each draped with metal strings. When Ntaimo plugs a power cable into the box, red and white LEDs illuminate the ridges. He touches the strings and a transcendent choral sound, akin to a full-bodied digital organ, fills the air.

This is Ntaimo’s “capaci-harp,” a digital instrument he created for 21M.370 Digital Instrument Design during his senior year, inspired by the church music he heard growing up in College Station, Texas. The instrument works through capacitive sensing; charge is stored when someone touches the conductive strings, is measured, and is converted to a sonic output.

Today, as a graduate student in mechanical engineering (MechE), Ntaimo prototypes actuators and motors in the Precision Motion Control Laboratory. He’s trying to improve upon traditional electromagnetic designs to create “better actuators that do more with less.” When Ntaimo was an undergrad, his now advisor, Professor David Trumper, encouraged him to pursue a graduate degree. “He’s really pushed me to become a better engineer,” says Ntaimo.

In addition to that work, he designs digital instruments with the goal of making it easier for a newbie or less practiced artist to perform and produce compelling music. “I want to empower people to jam with each other,” he says. “But to generate music and express yourself, to get to that extension-of-my-body level of expression, tends to take five to 10 years of playing consistently.” He notes the challenges of playing Western music, such as being in the right key—a different framing from a traditional Eastern approach to composition—and music sightreading abilities.

With the capaci-harp, Ntaimo has reduced the number of possible notes and chords to those of basic Western scales. The result is an instrument that can be picked up and played fairly proficiently in little time.

At MIT, Joseph Ntaimo took music classes, played in the MIT Symphony Orchestra, and became a respected DJ on campus, routinely mixing pop songs with lesser-known international genres.

Ntaimo began his musical journey in the fifth grade when he took up the violin in school. The novelty of being able to make a new kind of sound engaged him, and he stuck with it. Arriving at MIT as an undergraduate, though, he planned to focus on robotics. That’s because in high school, “I spent comical amounts of time in my friends’ parents’ garages just building robots and taking them apart,” says Ntaimo. “I’ve had an affinity for making and breaking things for most of my life.” By freshman year in high school, he was leading a 10-person robotics team. In fact, it was during a robotics competition that he received his acceptance email to MIT.

Ntaimo did take several robotics courses as an undergraduate MechE major. He also took music classes, played in the MIT Symphony Orchestra, and became a respected DJ on campus, routinely mixing pop songs with lesser-known international genres like Brazilian funk and South African amapiano.

He named his self-designed undergraduate major musical robotics. Ntaimo learned how to make sound-reactive LEDs, the precursors of what appear on his capaci-harp, and created the Ferro-Instrument, which produces music when it’s fed sound from another source. This sound can then be manipulated and bent. No sheet music required, just reciprocity. For all of his music projects, “you need math,” he says.

Ntaimo has found MIT to be the perfect place to blend his interests in engineering and music. “As a budding instrument designer, I have access to people who are really good at what they do, and they’re excited about applying that to something new,” he says. In addition, when he takes a class in something like digital signal processing or human-computer interaction, Ntaimo can immediately feed that back into his instrument design process.

Perhaps most importantly, Ntaimo says there’s a real appreciation of music at MIT, which means he doesn’t just have people helping him build his new instruments. He also has people in the audience eager to hear him play.