A primary aspect of a conductor's job is to unite the musicians in time, and they do that largely through nonverbal communication – through gestures, through even just a pointed look, says James Spinazzola, the Barbara & Richard T. Silver ’50, MD ’53 Associate Professor of music and director of winds in the Department of Music.
“A conductor can and should be able to communicate their intentions to the musicians without having to speak,” Spinazzola says. “But in order to do that, conductors need to develop a vocabulary of gestures. In a virtual reality setting, we can enable them to engage with gestures in a much more low stakes environment and literally augment their approach to this challenging problem by uniting it with real world scenarios.”
Provided
In "Child of Light," an experimental historical fiction set in 1890s Utica, Jesi Bender-Buell '07 tells the story of a young girl as she tries to understand her world through the interests of her parents: Spiritualism for Mama, electrical engineering for Papa.
Devin Flores/Cornell University
Enslavers posted as many as a quarter-million newspaper ads and flyers before 1865 to locate runaway slaves. Ed Baptist is leading the public crowdsourcing project, Freedom on the Move, that has digitized tens of thousands of these advertisements in an open-source site accessible to the public.
