DRAFT 12/5/10 The Marvin Minsky Music Project The theoretical and engineering works of Marvin Minsky -- who is often called "the Father of Artificial Intelligence" -- are widely known and cited. However, the role that music plays in his life and research is a richly revealing and popularly-accessible "hook" for the general public that has been largely neglected. As part of a comprehensive anthology of Marvin Minsky's works, ideas, and stories, we are using an exploration of his life with music as a major organizing thread. The two works that we envision are: • Musings: An interactive revision of Minsky's 1981 paper — "Music, Mind, and Meaning" — that sits atop a substantial multimedia database: video clips, audio, texts and pictures of Marvin's musical improvisations, compositions, discussions with other musicians about ideas, relationships with music, gossip and shop talk about music. • A stand-alone documentary film about Minsky's prodigious musical invention and its role in his life and thinking. To create these works, we are drawing from a rich historical collection of multimedia materials and a core of new materials produced by us. The main narrative thread will be provided by a series of video-recorded encounters between Minsky and Prof. Teresa Marrin Nakra, a close friend and former student. Together, they will visit a number of venues that have significance in Minsky's life, discussing the reminiscences that these places produce. They will also have sessions at a piano, where Minsky will alternate between musical improvisations at the keyboard and discussions of musical examples by others, themes in his paper, and stories from his life. To complement that material, we will produce recordings of discussions/music sessions of Minsky together with leading musicians, composers, technologists and entertainers of the 20th and 21st century. We anticipate that this project will take 40 weeks to complete, at a cost of $220,000. EFTA0069887