Category: Keynotes & Interviews

I don’t know how to express the level of gratitude I have for getting the opportunity to be by two of my biggest heroes today, Cory Cullinan and John Chowning. Thank you Brian Harshman for all of your help today and to all of the students,faculty, and staff at Pikes Peak State College and surrounding communities for the support, enthusiasm, and creative energy and presence for all that is happening at PPSC. Special shout out to Keith Simon for hosting us on KCME this week too! Grateful for you all!

Recently, I caught up with Doctor Noize, known in his adult releases as Cory Cullinan. Our conversation was as thoughtful, joyful, layered, and community-oriented as his music.Loved hearing your story. It’s truly one that needed to be shared.

He got an unfair huge slice of the talent pie, but you couldn’t hate him because he’s such a great guy.

Cory Cullinan is a multi-faceted artist who extends his reach through teaching, composing, and speaking on the issues that move him most. He uses his voice to spread awareness as a teacher, author and speaker.

We analysed more than 80,000 Kickstarter projects and found surprising success factors for raising capital. We observed one artist-entrepreneur’s campaign to reveal the secrets behind the statistics. To reveal the secret life of crowdfunding, we also report on a three year, in-depth study of one entrepreneur’s journey to create and produce an opera for children. Cory Cullinan, aka “Doctor Noize,” used Kickstarter to raise $50,000 for Phineas McBoof Crashes the Symphony. Crowdfunding works when the project and syndicate identities align; when the backers say (to quote Doctor Noize): “We’re with the band.” Ultimately, successful reward-based crowdfunding of novel creative projects requires authenticity, inspiring a syndicate, and constantly re-creating the campaign in real time.

He traces the roots of the current moment back to Silicon Valley. He grew up there. He knew Steve Jobs through his brother. The father of one of his friends founded Adobe. He went to Stanford with future tech leaders.“They were trying to make the world a better place,” he said. “But what has happened?”The result, he argues, is a culture drowning in digital connectivity but starved of real connection. “We’re less social, more tribal,” he said. “We’ve saddled the nexat generation with devices that unintentionally make us all worse. And we must solve this.

We’re very happy to have some time today with acclaimed chart-busting musician, commissioned composer, author, award-winning teacher, speaker, studio owner and — WHEW! — humorist extraordinaire Cory Cullinan; greetings and salutations Cory and welcome to Vents Magazine!

It means a lot to me that I get to connect someone who has played a meaningful role in my life to young musicians, faculty and audiences out here. So they can hear from someone who’s really made a dent in their musical world. He really is a legend.

In our modern internet-attention-span culture, we need the arts more than ever to buildour kids’ minds, souls and confidence to prepare them for creative solutions with positive energy.As this Thesis Portfolio will show, the Recording Arts can help build those traits — often inremarkably fast and intensely memorable experiences — in elementary age children, yet arehardly utilized at that age group at all.

We sponsored workshops and training seminars to better engage the increasing minority population at our school. Under Cory’s guidance being involved in student government was perceived as the “cool” thing to do. School Spirit became the norm at Los Altos High School.