The workshop honored artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, and took its name from Minksy’s landmark paper, Music, Mind and Meaning. The two-day event drew a gathering of leading scientists, video game designers, mathematicians, musicians, andauthors who discussed and demonstrated the creative possibilities that have emerged at the intersection of music and computers.

Click here to listen to a podcast featuring Guitar Hero co-creator Eran Egozy and author of “Guitar Zero” Gary Marcus recorded at the MMI Workshop

An attendee’s Flickr Photostream!

Alex Braidwood, Independent Media Artist, wearing his “Noisolation Headphones” in the MMI demonstrations.

Bowers appeared on Broadway as Zazu in Disney’s The Lion King, and Leggett in The Scarlet Pimpernel. His autobiographical play, It Goes Without Saying, opened Off Broadway in 2006 and enjoyed a sold-out, extended run. Bowers has performed on the stages of Radio City Music Hall, Madison Square Garden, and the Kennedy Center. His regional theater credits include The Berkshire Theater Festival, The Denver Center Theater, Cincinnati Playhouse, George Street Playhouse, Montana Rep, Two Rivers Theater, Paper Mill Playhouse, Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Repertory of St. Louis, and the Pioneer Theater Company.

Bowers can be seen in the feature film, Two Weeks Notice, starring Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant. His television credits include All My Children, One Life to Live, Remember W.E.N.N., Law & Order, and Disney’s Out of the Box. While on Broadway, he was featured on The Rosie O’Donnell Show, The Today Show, and The Tony Awards.

Dean John Laughton states, “The arts are, in the end, about telling stories and making connections. Bill brings a special insight to his performances that find the meaningful in the everyday occurrences and presents them in an unforgettable way. ”

 Social inequality is a theme running through the articles selected by John C. Pollock, a professor of communication studies, for a special issue of a leading journal,Mass Communication and Society, in November/December 2011.  Titled “The Community Structure Model: Innovations in Exploring the Impact of Society on Media”, the symposium views media from a “contrarian” perspective.  Instead of examining the impact of media on society, the perspective adopted by most media scholars, the “community structure” approach does the opposite by exploring the impact of society on media.

The symposium made two major contributions to traditional community structure literature.  One is that scholars have moved far beyond traditional measures of community political power to encompass a far greater range of community demographic variables or aggregate measures of community identity, membership, participation, production, consumption or access, ranging from income or education to health care access.

Although previous research in the community structure tradition emphasized “top-down” roles for media as “guard dogs” protecting or reinforcing the interests of elites, articles in the new collection emphasize “bottom-up” roles for media as mirrors of the interests of “vulnerable” groups such as the poor, the unemployed, those in high crime areas, as well as those who have been historically marginalized such as women, gays, African-Americans and Hispanics.

According to guest editor Pollock, who served as a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Argentina giving lectures on journalism, amassing evidence that media can mirror social inequality represents an “emerging realignment” in modern journalism research. Pollock said, “Traditionally, US journalists have clearly articulated professional norms of ‘objectivity’ and ‘balance,’ avoiding the appearance of favoring the interests of any particular group. In Argentina, by contrast, where I spent the spring of 2010 giving lectures on the connections between social inequality and media coverage, journalists are proud to champion the interests of the disadvantaged, proud that they illuminate inequities in affordable housing, access to education, access to health care, and living conditions generally.”  Pollock continued, “I hope that the same respected US journalism tradition that threw a spotlight on inequitable treatment of women and African Americans can nurture journalists’ confidence in their capacity to illuminate modern social inequality generally.”

The Music, Mind, and Invention Workshop will take place March 30 and 31, 2012 at The College of New Jersey. Its purpose will be to explore the rich interconnections between music, cognition, computation, and creativity, addressing themes such as: creativity across disciplines, ways of thinking about music, and music as a medium for improvement. The workshop will feature a keynote address by Marvin Minsky, invited talks by Noam Elkies, Tod Machover, and Dmitri Tymoczko, panel discussions, and presentations of peer-reviewed papers and creative work.  Submissions that present novel theories, late-breaking results, and new ways of addressing unresolved questions are welcome. Special efforts will be made to recruit submissions and reviewers from a broad range of disciplines. The workshop will be open to the public.

The course explores dance as cultural, spiritual and aesthetic expression and develops a sense of body awareness and alignment. Several styles of dance will be studied including; Bollywood, flamenco, capoeira, tap, hip-hop, and classical and contemporary ballet.

Risa Kaplowitz co-founded DanceVision with former American Ballet Theater ballerina, Susan Jaffe and is the co-founder and Director of Princeton Dance and Theater Studio. She also founded D.A.N.C.E. (Dance As a Necessary Component of Education), an outreach program that brings dance to New Jersey schools. She was a member of Houston Ballet and Manhattan Ballet and performed with Pennsylvania Ballet and Metropolitan Opera Ballet.

As a two-credit, repeatable course with the VPA prefix, two semesters of the course will satisfy one course unit of the Literary, Visual and Performing Arts breadth requirement.

The Hand in Hand Concerts are designed to create an international opportunity to appeal for support for Japan’s reconstruction.

The concert is a collaboration between American musicians at TCNJ, the New York City Opera Orchestra, and three Japanese choirs: the MJC Ensemble from Fukushima, Tohoku Fukushi University Chorus Group from Miyagi and Iwate Prefectural University Chorus Group from Iwate. Mr. Atsushi Yamada will conduct the choirs, along with performances from soloists Yunah Lee and Leslie Valentine.

Ticketing information will be available soon!