Can music repair damaged tissue? Is it possible to hear it through another person's ears? If anyone knows, it's Tod Machover. As he prepares to create an innovative symphony for Edinburgh, Charlotte Higgins meets the music professor

The producer of 50 Nobel laureates, and the academic home of Tim Berners-Lee and Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology is America's powerhouse of pioneering thinking. One cold morning, as I step into the bright modern building that houses the research groups collectively known as the MIT Media Lab, I get a taste of some of the ideas brewed here: in the foyer is an exhibition featuring prosthetic running blades used by Paralympians, developed by the lab's biomechatronics group; there are visualisations of bikes that somehow appear to combine urban transportation with online dating. But what I have come to see is upstairs: a glass-sided room containing a grand piano, some vast metal sculptural objects dangling from the ceiling, and banks of screens. This is a laboratory devoted to the music of tomorrow.

The research group that works here is run by Tod Machover, a cellist and digital geek with a wiry mop of dark hair and a fast-talking manner. After studying at Juilliard in New York, he began his academic life in Paris in the 1970s, at the music research institute attached to the Pompidou Centre. He returned to the US in 1985, just as the kind of electronic instruments he was working with in Paris – an elaborate 4X synthesiser, for which Pierre Boulez composed his work Répons – were about to be transformed by the PC. "I thought: 'OK, there have been all these experiments on this amazing machine, but there's only one of them – and it's in Paris. There must be a way of doing this with less expensive and more transportable technology.'"

So, Machover developed the "hyperinstrument", which he defines as "an instrument that knows how it is being played – and can sound like anything". Its range is extended by sensors and software. Machover has developed one for cellist Yo Yo Ma, allowing him to stretch his virtuosity and add different sounds to his repertoire. He and his team of researchers (known as Opera of the Future) have also made simple, responsive instruments for children, such as the "music shaper", which resembles a giant embroidered pincushion, but is wired to produce complex sounds when pushed and squeezed by a child.

"What I am trying to do is reverse the traditional process," says Machover. "It takes a long time for a person's mastery of an instrument and their musical imagination to become one. And, of course, you can't replace that. But the kids' instruments are about [letting] kids really fall in love with music first." In other words, they give them the fun of making quite sophisticated sounds despite the fact that they have only limited motor skills: their creativity and imagination are harnessed before they learn an instrument the hard way. It was this sort of thinking that led a couple of Machover's PhD students to invent the hugely successful computer game Guitar Hero, launched in 2005, in which the player manipulates a guitar-shaped controller to simulate playing rock classics.

Right now, Machover is working on a new composition, Festival City, for the Edinburgh international festival this August; he envisages it as a collaboration with anyone who loves the Scottish capital. The work will, he hopes, be a kind of "tone poem" that "feels and sounds like the city and its festivals". Anyone interested can submit a recording, or simply suggest a particular sound that they associate with the city. Machover adds, somewhat darkly, "It may be hard to imagine avoiding bagpipes completely." (GuyFromPortugal has already submitted a snippet entitled "The sounds of constant wind".) From early June, via an app, there will also be the chance for members of the public to manipulate and alter the weight, complexity and texture of melodies composed by Machover, who will use the best in the final piece.

Machover gives me a tour of the lab. I meet several of his highly serious and alarmingly articulate young PhD students. Janice Wang hands me a rugelach pastry (a traditional Jewish snack) that she's just baked in the kitchen: it's an experimental pastry, the colour of grass, dyed using Japanese green tea. Wang is exploring music and food, asking "how can music be influenced by taste, and especially how music can influence your sense of taste".

Machover gives me an idea of the sort of futuristic thinking this lab can facilitate: one of the virtues of MIT's "antidisciplinary" ethos, he says, is "that not only can I go across the hall and find a neuroscientist, but I can say: 'Here's a project I think might interest both of us.' I don't think I would have done the kind of work I do if I'd been in a regular music department."

He mentions Pawan Sinha, a neuroscientist interested in brain plasiticity, or how your brain adapts to varying circumstances. They have been talking about measuring people's brain responses to a famous piece of music – Beethoven's Symphony No 5, for example – and using that information to resynthesise the recording according to that person's specific listening experience. Machover says: "Imagine listening to a piece you know well through the perception of another person. If you did it the right way, it would be one of the most powerful experiences you could have of artificial empathy."

This is the other side of the coin from creating a personalised musical instrument for Ma or, as Machover has previously done, developing individualised software to enable a severely disabled person to both compose and conduct music. "It's a way of sharing something about yourself with other people," Machover says. "One of my students said what he is interested in is whether we can find a way to create musical experiences that allow people to find each other, and find out about each other. It's an idea about music as a way of connecting people – not as in: 'Oh gee, I found out we like the same piece', but as in: 'In what way can I play this piece that will show you something interesting about me?'"

Another Opera of the Future project looks at the way the use of the voice – singing, chanting – can increase wellbeing and health, partly by encouraging people to use their voices without inhibition or fear. "We are developing vocal exercises to liberate your voice, sensitising you to listening to your voice, and feeling it through your body." So far, so Gareth Malone. But Machover quickly leaps into what sounds like the realms of science-fiction: "There's a man at MIT who is the world expert in tissue and cartilage. If your cartilage works well, then your joints work well and your blood moves easily. But any number of things can go wrong, and it's not well understood how to keep a healthy system."

But what does this have to do with music? "It turns out that this tissue and cartilage guy is a violist. He is interested in unusual techniques for regulating circulation and electricity in your body; he is interested in the vibrations that go through your body when you are playing the viola or singing. He thinks singing could be good for your cartilage and circulation." Machover is also working with the Buddhist chaplain at MIT (who is, naturally, also a neuroscientist) "to look at traditional chant – about how everything from the sound of Sanskrit to chanting techniques affect the body".

And with that, Machover says he has to dash – presumably to an intensive meeting about artificial empathy, or cartilage and circulation tuning, or perhaps even the emotional and musical effects of biting into experimental grass-green Jewish pastries.

• To suggest sounds for Festival City, go to eif.co.uk/festival-city. The work will be premiered by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra on 27 August.