“Experimenting was in my blood.”

-Mari Kimura

“Technology works for her in the same way it has worked for great artists for thousands of years,” says John Crawford, a professor of intermedia arts at UC Irvine who’s been collaborating with Kimura since he helped recruit her to the school. “At one point, the violin she plays now was seen as cutting-edge technology. They had to not only invent it but invent methods of playing. She finds ways of adapting technology to her own creative pursuits.

“The MUGIC device is a perfect example,” Crawford says. “People have done different kinds of motion tracking before, but she has found a way to harness the capabilities of these little chips and batteries and pieces of plastic to create new forms of expression. It’s extremely influential, really interesting, and a lot of fun to work together on.”

Violinist and composer Mari Kimura developed and patented MUGIC® (Music/User Gesture Interface Control), a Wi-Fi motion sensor musicians can use to create sounds, change lighting, and generate and control visual effects.

Kimura also has intellectual roots in the culture of innovation around Boston and Cambridge. Her parents met as Fulbright Scholars on a ship coming to the US; her father, Ken-ichi Kimura, was headed to MIT, and her mother, Aiko Kimura, a social scientist focusing on women’s labor laws, to Mount Holyoke and later Radcliffe. They married in the MIT Chapel, and returned to Japan when Aiko was pregnant. Kimura was born in Tokyo.

Kimura graduated with a degree in violin performance from Toho Gakuen School of Music in Japan (which also counts former Boston Symphony Orchestra music director Seiji Ozawa among its alumni) and came to BU to earn her master’s, studying under Roman Totenberg, the late CFA professor emeritus of music and a friend of her undergraduate mentor in Japan. She went on to receive a doctorate in musical arts from Juilliard.

Kimura’s interest in the intersection of music and technology, she says, began in earnest at BU—on and off campus.

To fulfill a requirement, she took an electronic music class, in which she was the only woman, she says. Samuel Headrick, a CFA associate professor of music, composition, and music theory, introduced her to a whole new world of sounds that were then produced largely by analog synthesizers.

While studying at CFA, she rented a room on Carlton Street in Brookline, near the BU Bridge. She was drawn into the social circle of Marvin Minsky, the late MIT computer scientist and a force behind that school’s artificial intelligence and media labs, who lived nearby on Ivy Street.

“I didn’t know how famous he was or anything, but I started hanging out in his kitchen,” Kimura says. “I got exposed to all these AI people and creative minds. And he said, ‘Oh, so you’re a violinist? What are you going to do if you lose your hand? You should start composing.’ And I’m like, ‘Who is this crazy person?’”

Together, Headrick’s class and Minsky’s prodding changed the course of her career. She learned about the groundbreaking work of the late Mario Davidovsky, a professor of composition at Columbia who became known for pairing electronic sounds with acoustic chamber music. She began integrating electronic elements into her own compositions and performances. She was eventually recruited to teach at Juilliard and NYU and was a visiting researcher at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.

Along the way, she met and married a French mathematician and computer scientist, Hervé Brönnimann, who works in the hedge fund industry. Their daughter is a psychology student at UC San Diego, and their son joined the US Army Reserve this past year after graduating from high school. 

Her work bringing the MUGIC to market has led her to pursue an executive MBA at UC Irvine, and her student cohort includes several veterans who, she says, “became a support group for me, the mom, saying, ‘Day or night, you can call us.’”

Kimura says she had moments early in her career where as a woman she may have been held back by the culture of the field. A white, male, prominent professor asked someone, ‘Who programs Mari’s sounds?’ thinking I wouldn’t be able to do it myself. I don’t think it was gender prejudice. It’s more like, ‘How can a violin player program for herself?’ The friend who got asked was more upset than I was.

“I have this image in my head of myself: I’ve been doing this very unusual thing for a classically trained violinist, and I have to have this huge machete to cut through the jungle and carve out the road I want to walk on,” she says. “So I thought, if I give machetes to five other people and we do this together, then the people behind us can go further and faster. That’s why I teach.”