Thursday, April 3rd at 5pm Lewis Music Library, MIT Light reception to followBut Does It Still Smell Like Teen Spirit?: Sound, Identity, Expectation, and the Dialogue of the Cover SongIn this talk, music analyst, ethnomusicologist, and MIT Associate Professor of Music Leslie A. Tilley presents her work-in-progress on the analysis of cover songs. Examining the genres, styles, identities, and contexts of Nirvana’s grunge hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and two important covers by women artists—the bare acoustic piano cover by alternative confessional singer-songwriter Tori Amos and the epic orchestral version by Malia J and Think Up Anger, featured in Marvel's 2021 blockbuster movie Black Widow—Tilley explores the spaces that popular music recordings leave open for radical reimaginings, the diverse and contradictory responses such invitations evoke in both artists and listeners, and the multiple analytical lenses needed unpack these complex musical and social dialogues.About the SpeakerLeslie A. Tilley is an Associate Professor of Music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a music analyst and ethnomusicologist with research interests in musical transformation and alternative approaches to music theory, analysis, and pedagogy. Her book Making it up Together: The Art of Collective Improvisation in Balinese Music and Beyond (University of Chicago Press, 2019) presents close analyses of the Balinese improvised forms reyong norot and kendang arja while offering broad-reaching analytical frameworks for examining improvisation and collective creativity across genres and cultures. The book won the prestigious Emerging Scholar Book Award from the Society for Music Theory in 2022. Tilley's current work expands the purview of her forays into musical transformation, proposing analytical models for a comparative and multi-modal approach to the analysis of cover songs.About the Music Forum SeriesThe MIT Music & Theater Arts Music Forum is a series of public presentations by music scholars from inside and outside of MIT. Hosted in the Lewis Music Library and presented in partnership with MIT Libraries, the MTA Music Forum Series gives the MIT Community an opportunity to engage with leading voices in every field of music scholarship. Past presenters include John Harbison, Julia Wolfe, Terry Riley, Don Byron, and others.

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Speaker: Xinyu Fang (Harvard)Title: Outline of the argument for Mordell's conjectureAbstract:I will present an outline of the argument for the proof of Mordell's conjecture, following Section 5 of Lawrence-Venkatesh. Specifically, I will explain how to reduce Mordell's conjecture to two key inputs: the existence of a good abelian-by-finite family (the Kodaira-Parshin family) and the finiteness of rational points whose fiber along the finite map has large Galois orbits (proven using p-adic Hodge theory).Reference:$\bullet$ Lawrence and Venkatesh, Diophantine problems and $p$-adic period mappings, Section 5.

Dinner and Learn with Marcie Black.Marcie Black earned three degrees from MIT: a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering (6-1), a Master of Engineering in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (6-P), and a PhD in Electrical Engineering (EECS-Doctoral) under Institute Professor Mildred Dresselhaus. At MIT, she was involved in Microsystems Technology Laboratories, Phonathon Volunteer, and Varsity Women's Gymnastics (1991-1992). She was also a Baker House, East Campus, and Sigma Kappa member.Marcie is currently CEO and co-founder of Advanced Silicon Group, where she combines her expertise in team building, project management, IP strategy, and company culture with her technical background in electronic materials, optics, semiconductors, solar cells, batteries, and nanotechnology. Her impressive career includes founding Bandgap Engineering, focusing on black silicon solar cells, and working as a technical staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Earlier in her career, she worked as a device engineer at Motorola. Her achievements include an R&D 100 award in 2009 and recognition as one of Mass High Tech's "Women-to-Watch in 2010". She has authored over 30 papers and holds more than 15 patents.

Join evolutionary biologist Menno Schilthuizen to explore a new dawn of natural history, practiced by community scientists in their own urban jungle.Imagine taking your smartphone-turned-microscope to an empty lot and discovering a rare mason bee that builds its nest in empty snail shells. Or a miniature spider that hunts ants and carries their corpses around. With a team of citizen scientists, that's exactly what Menno Schilthuizen did — one instance in the evolutionary biologist's campaign to take natural science to the urban landscape where most of us live today. In this delightful book, The Urban Naturalist, Schilthuizen invites us to join him, to embark on a new age of discovery, venturing out as intrepid explorers of our own urban habitat — and maybe in the process do the natural world some good.Copies of The Urban Naturalist will be available for purchase onsite from the MIT Press Bookstore.

VOLTA led by MIT Visiting Artist Janessa Clarkand choreographed in collaborationwith the performersA multimedia dance work that explores the relationship between the body, technology, and our impact on the natural world.performed by MIT studentsDAINA AUGUST '28ARROW B '26ARIEL McGEE '26MONICA PETULLA '26NINA PETULLA '26KYLIE WALSH '25MEGAN A ZHAN YAMOAH '20(G)PERFORMANCES:April 3, 4, and 5@ 8pm in W97 Black Box