Group items tagged

Online courses in entrepreneurship and small business for artists and arts managers. The courses are offered through Fractured Atlas, a non-profit national arts organization that provides resources to every member of the arts industry. The courses look like great introductory refresher courses on a range of topics from marketing for career development.

An MIT course on the History Of Modular Synthesizers. Very fascinating if you are into electronic music.

This could be fun to have going while doing work for this course. See what we come up with!

Daniel Levitin is the Author of "This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession". He is a musician and neuroscientist and this post is him giving a talk about his research and book at Microsoft Research. One of his main premises from his research is that music may be more fundamental to humans than language.

This is a very riveting talk. I didn't come away with the idea that music might be more fundamental to humans than language, but that music is fundamental, as is language, and that each of us is a musical expert, if not expert performers!

I have continued thinking about this topic...Levitin also intimated that musical capacity is similar to language acquisition in that there is a window of time in which that capacity needs to be triggered in order for fluency in music to be attained. The window for language acquisition is birth to puberty. If your language capacity is not triggered within this time frame, you can't learn to speak as we understand speech. I wonder if this is really true of musical capacity...perhaps, but perhaps not in the way that it is of language. Of course they massive amounts of research have been applied to the question of language.

I recently stumbled upon the University of New Mexico's interdisciplinary program in Art + Technology. They describe it as such. " The program fosters an atmosphere of radical creativity and thoughtful engagement with emergent and established technologies. Students are expected to make work that comments on, engages with, and expands our notions of what technology based art can be through courses that explore high tech immersive environments alongside consumer electronic hacking and simple analog circuit building. Labs are equipped with industry standard software as well as free open source analogous software options. Studio production is coupled with critical inquiry into the relationship between art, technology, politics, society and culture."