Yesterday was Nyepi, which is the Balinese new year. Unlike the Western new year, where people are rowdy and hungover, Nyepi is famously a day of silence in Bali. Everything – and I mean everything – on the island shuts down for the entire day. All the shops are closed, the airport is closed, no-one […]
Something I’ve been developing in Indonesia is a concept of how music evolves. We’re all familiar with the biological concept of evolution: organisms have random traits introduced into generations, and the traits which stick end up becoming more and more common, resulting in a species that is more successful in its environment. The story I […]
It surprises a lot of people to think about research as having a particular type of lens, particularly in the arts. It shouldn’t, but it does. I think part of this is that science conditioned people to believe that science is objective. The scientific process is great, and the process helps a lot, but we […]
Last week, I had the pleasure of going to Kuala Lumpur for some, shall we say, administrative reasons. I went there briefly last year, too, but this time I was doing it more as a splurge trip: I was in a nicer hotel and spent some more money doing nice things than the backpacker cheap-as-chips […]
Last Sunday — so that awkward in-between where it happened almost right after my last blog post — I had the pleasure of performing in an open mic in Ubud, Bali. It was a fortuitous event — I was asked by the organiser who was trying to drum up some more support, it had been […]
This week, I’ve been continuing to practice kendang, which is the drum that leads a gamelan ensemble. It’s quite difficult to get the right procession of sounds on it, so my teacher encourages me to just practice getting the sounds out first: like the Karate Kid, I need to have those basics down pat, and […]
This week, I’ve been playing around with ideas of modernity. This is partly inspired by Arjun Appadurai, who’s seminal text Modernity at Large I’ve been studying for my PhD. In it, Appadurai argues that modernity is not a simple transition but an in-flux set of scapes that influence modernity. For example, rather than a country […]
If you haven’t heard of context switching, it’s the concept that moving between tasks diminishes overall output. For example, if you’re trying to write something (an essay, report, etc.) and then check emails, you’ve context-switched: you have moved from the context of writing something to the context of scrolling through emails. This shift results in […]
For some reason, I’ve been on a real Star Wars kick lately. It’s been 20 years since Revenge of the Sith ended the prequel trilogy, and like symmetry, it’s been 10 years since The Force Awakens kicked off the sequel trilogy. Interestingly, neither trilogy captured the magic of the originals and yet both trilogies still […]
It’s been a couple of years now since AI really took off, with ChatGPT becoming this widespread, easily available tool available for free* (of course, with ourselves being the product) for people to use. Although early reactions to AI were – and continue to be – mixed, I also find it hard not to believe […]