Tod Machover (born November 24, 1953, in Mount Vernon, New York) is an Emmy-award winning composer, inventor of hyperinstruments and hyperscore software, promoter of music AI and participatory opera, and professor at the MIT Media Lab.

He was named Director of Musical Research at IRCAM in 1980. Joining the faculty at the new Media Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1985, he became Professor of Music and Media and Director of the Experimental Media Facility. Currently Professor of Music and Media at the MIT Media Lab, he is head of the Lab's Hyperinstruments/Opera of the Future group and has been co-director of the Things That Think (TTT) and Toys of Tomorrow (TOT) consortia since 1995. In 2006, he was named visiting professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He has composed significant works for Yo-Yo Ma, Joshua Bell, Matt Haimovitz, the Ying Quartet, the Boston Pops, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Penn & Teller, and many others, as well as designed and implemented various interactive systems for performance by Peter Gabriel and Prince. Machover gave a keynote lecture at NIME-02, the second international conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, which was held in 2002 at the former Media Lab Europe in Dublin, Ireland, and is a frequent lecturer worldwide. Machover is a Finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his opera Death and the Powers. He was the first recipient of the Arts Advocacy Award from the Kennedy Center's National Committee of the Performing Arts in 2013.

He attended the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1971 and received a BM and MM from the Juilliard School in New York where he studied with Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions (1973–1978). He also started his Doctoral studies at Juilliard before being invited as Composer-in-Residence to Pierre Boulez's new Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in 1978.

In the fall of 1978, Tod Machover arrived at IRCAM in Paris, and was introduced to Giuseppe di Giugno's digital synthesizer 4 series. Light was premiered at the Metz Festival in November 1979 using the 4C synthesizer, the brainchild of di Giugno's concept that "synthesizers should be made for musicians, not for the people that make them." (Electric Sound, p.181). In 1981, he composed Fusione Fugace for solo performance on a real-time digital synthesizer called the 4X machine, the first prototype of his hyperinstruments. During his time at IRCAM in 1986 and 1987, he was motivated to score for keyboard and percussion duet with emphasis on extending their performance into many complex sound layers. His first opera VALIS used di Giugno's 4X system to process voices, which foreshadowed his concept of the hyperinstrument (term coined in 1986) and his experiment of AI opera in 2023.

At MIT's Media Lab, he developed methods for taking many more sophisticated measurements of the instrument as well as the performer's expression. He focused on augmenting keyboard instruments, percussion, strings, even the act of conducting, with the goal of developing and implementing new technology to expand the function of the musical instruments and their performers. He propelled forward-thinking research in the field of musical performance and interaction using new musical and technological resources.

Originally concentrated to the enhancement of virtuosic performance, his research has expanded in a direction of building sophisticated interactive musical instruments for non-professional musicians, children, and the general public. He premiered 'Brain Opera' in 1996, an interactive music experience with hyperinstruments designed for anybody to play using their natural skills, aiming at making every human being into a musician. He became finalist of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his opera Death and Powers (premiered in 2010), an innovative opera that merges morphing objects and sculptural sounds to explore profound themes of legacy, human existence, and technological transcendence. His most recent opera "Schoenberg in Hollywood" (premiered in 2018) explores the difficult balance between art and mass appeal through the journey of Arnold Schoenberg.

Tod Machover devised the concept of hyperinstruments: an extension of existing instruments which can morph the sounds into other instruments, objects, or the entire orchestra based on the performer's motions. The Hyperinstrument project, initiated in 1986 by the MIT Media Lab under Tod Machover, aims to create technologically augmented musical instruments that enhance the expressive capabilities of virtuosic performers. These instruments were designed to expand the possibilities of traditional instruments like guitars, keyboards, percussion, and strings, as well as to augment conducting. They have been utilized by renowned artists and organizations including cellist Yo-Yo Ma, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, musician Peter Gabriel, and the illusionists Penn & Teller.

Beginning in 1992, the project's scope broadened to include the development of sophisticated interactive musical systems for non-professionals, including students and music enthusiasts. Systems like "Drum-Boy" and "Joystick Music" enabled users to create complex music through intuitive gestures or descriptive language, influencing a real-time interactive environment.