I’m sitting on the 2nd floor of the Beethoven Haus Museum, which is situated in the historic house Beethoven grew up in (although, renovations have changed it significantly from Beethoven’s time). It’s a little room, with a set of couches arranged in a cross in the middle of it, a few windows, and a sign […]
On Thursday, I hit a personal record — 5000 words written in a day. On Thursday, I backed this up with another 4000 words. I’ve been trying to finish a chapter of my thesis before I leave for conferences in Europe — I quite like this as a deadline, as it means I won’t feel […]
Last week, I was listening to some Indonesian news through SBS, one of Australia’s publicly-funded broadcasters. They do a range of news programs in many languages, and it’s a great learning resources. Now, normally, when listening to Indonesian I can make out the general gist of a story even if I don’t know the meaning […]
Hello there! Long time, no post. I promise, it’s not you, it’s me. Just a note: this post contains some descriptions of sickness, including vomit. If you’re squeamish, you may want to pass. When I was due to leave Bali, I woke up in the morning absolutely freezing cold. If you’ve ever been to Bali, […]
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 […]