Podcast with Jonatas Manzolli on music and mathematics and algorithmic composition

Can mathematics compose music? Can robots create art that is genuinely good for people? Brazilian mathematician and composer Jonatas Manzolli explores the collision between understanding and interpretation , and why collaboration between art and science may be essential for humanity's survival. Subscribe for more episodes on how collaboration works across disciplines. Jonatas Manzolli occupies a rare intersection: trained in mathematics, driven by music composition, and committed to building bridges between algorithmic understanding and artistic interpretation. As head of the Interdisciplinary Center for Sound Communication at the University of Campinas in Brazil, he has spent decades pushing students and collaborators to confront a fundamental question , whether the purpose of human endeavor is to understand the world or to live in it. The conversation opens with Manzolli's formative tension. Studying mathematics and music simultaneously, he found himself caught between two demands: mathematicians wanted him to understand; musicians wanted him to interpret and feel. His PhD in music composition was an attempt to resolve this by emphasizing creation, but the resolution came not as a choice between the two but as a commitment to being an interface , translating between the possibilities of understanding and the necessities of expression. This personal trajectory becomes a lens for examining collaboration itself. Manzolli argues that the most productive collaborations happen when participants bring genuinely different modes of thinking , not just different expertise within the same paradigm. His work with Paul Verschure on robotic systems that interact with human performers illustrates this: the question shifted from "how does the robot talk to the system?" to "how do we produce artifacts that are good for people?" , a move from technical capability to human benefit. The pandemic reshaped Manzolli's understanding of collaborative practice. Isolated in a small space, experiencing what he calls "the aesthetics of compression," he began writing musical letters , short scores sent to friends as a form of connection. When 15 dancers responded with movement to a poem he wrote, he used algorithmic composition to merge their movement and voice into something he calls music, even though it contains no traditional notes. The result demonstrates how collaboration can emerge from constraint when participants trust each other enough to respond authentically. On the relationship between art and survival, Manzolli is direct: not all problems can be solved by science alone. Environmental crises have layers, ecological, historical, relational, that require cultural and artistic engagement alongside technical solutions. A future society that eliminates space for art, science, and culture in equal measure will not survive its own intolerance. His proposed change to humanity is the capacity to believe in other people and to become tolerant of others , a deceptively simple formulation that connects mathematical precision with artistic generosity. Part of the Ernst Strüngmann Forum series on Collaboration, produced with the Convergent Science Network.