Teja

Independent research and a culture of encouragement

Posted on March 18, 2017 by Teja Academic Personal 0

Juggling current (open) projects

Today, I was thinking of writing about tulips, which finally started blooming, or about inconveniences with toothaches, which are making me wish that I was in Slovenia and able to complain about it to my dentist. But somehow I lack the inspiration for it. Instead, I’ll write about various research projects that I’m currently juggling and having immense fun with. After all: what good is it to have your own blog if you can’t share you enthusiasm? Still, I’ll begin by sharing this picture of growing tulips that I took today (just so you know that I’m truly in the Netherlands): Continue reading…

Book Thoughts: The World in Six Songs

Posted on March 9, 2017 by Teja Academic 0

One of the most known books tackling music science is Daniel Levitin’s 2009 book The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature. It was also one of the first books I read when I started to get interested in the topic. Continue reading…

How to find a parking spot for your bike

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Teja Personal 0

Or the adventures of living in the Netherlands

You know nothing, Katie Melua. There might be 9 million bicycles in Beijing, but there are 13 million of them in the Netherlands. However, Beijing has 20 million inhabitants and the Netherlands 16 millions, which basically means that nearly every person living here has a bike. If we exclude the people who are too old or too young* to cycle, it actually turns out that some have more than one bike. There, somewhere in the shed, is a spare bike just in case of a flat tire.
Continue reading…

Hogwarts in Utrecht

Posted on February 25, 2017 by Teja Personal 0

Few things marked my childhood as much as Harry Potter. And not only my childhood, also (mostly) my teenage years. This isn’t that unusual for our generation, because we grew up with the heroes of this book and film franchise. In my last year of primary school, the 7th (and last true) Harry Potter book was published, while in the last year of high school, we cried as we said goodbye to the characters once again when the last movie came out. My point is this: when I found out in December that Harry Potter: The Exhibition was coming to the Netherlands, I knew I was going to go. Even though I currently have a slightly bitter opinion towards J. K. Rowling (but about this some other time).

Music is magic

Posted on February 19, 2017 by Teja Academic 0

And we can’t live without it

I feel lucky, sometimes, because I’ve chosen to focus my academic efforts on a field that arouses interest in both the general audience and amongst scientists. Consequently, there are books which are perfect for a relative beginner such as myself: books that talk about the scientific aspects of music in an understandable way. One such book is Philip Ball’s The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It (2010). Below are a couple of curiosities I learned while reading it.*

And where are you from?

Posted on February 17, 2017 by Teja Personal 0

For the past two weeks, it seems as if that’s a question I’m constantly answering. I don’t only think that. I’m sure that this is the most popular question. Only in February, I had to talk about my country of origin:

in every first class lesson of the new programme,
in a meeting with a professor with whom I’ll be working on a project,
in a conversation with every new classmate,
at the dentist (three times!).

Mind-mapping music science

Posted on November 4, 2016 by Teja Academic 0

Or introducing colours to the world of music

Recently, while sitting on the couch, I started thinking about the many branches that the scientific study of music appears to encompass. Everybody in the field(s) seems to implicitly understand the different aspects, but no one writes about them. This was, I realized, one of the reasons why I held so much wonder at the beginning, when I started discovering the many sides of the music science equation. That day, I grabbed my sketchbook* and outlined the following mind map (to which I later added colours, because my life needs a splash of rainbow). Continue reading…

The Singing … What Now?

Posted on October 13, 2016 by Teja Academic 0

Talking about the origins of music and language

The curiously named book The Singing Neanderthals by Stephen Mithen is the book I wish I’d written and still hold hopes that one day I might. Its basic premise is that music and language developed at around the same time and that music is a fundamental part of us, not merely a byproduct. It’s a thought that surely resonates with all music enthusiasts. Continue reading…