January 27, 2009
Research
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Today I got to talk a bit about my project on Noorderlicht, a weekly show on radio 1 about scientific research in the Netherlands. It was quite fun to go to Hilversum to see the offices of the Dutch broadcasting company and to experience how a radio show is made. I think I did pretty OK, considering I’d never been interviewed before (in fact, I had never expected to have to answer the question why computational linguistics is interesting, I’ve always kind of considered it as a given) and I’m also not really used to talking about my work in Dutch. Thankfully the other interviewee, Prof. Jan Scholtes of Maastricht University, was better prepared for these kind of things and came up with some nice examples. When I grow up I want to be able to talk about my work as clearly as he does!
The only thing I find weird is that my voice sounds so high when I heard it back on the mp3…somehow it seems lower to me normally…
January 27, 2009
Blogroll
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The past week Leiden celebrated its annual Jazz festival. Unfortunately I’d been travelling around too much to catch any of the concerts, except the one on Sunday by Kim Hoorweg. In fact, I didn’t only go to the concert, but also to the accompanying workshop in which she taught about 14 jazz enthusiasts about jazz improvisations and we also studied some background choirs to ‘Lady be good’. It was a bit scary since I’d never really done improvisations, and I also don’t really sing with other people usually but everyone was very cool and relaxed. Even though some other people were also not that experienced at improvising you could already notice that everyone had their own style, probably influenced by what they listen to?
Anyway, the concert itself was supercool. Steve and Alex were also there, and even though we’d bought tickets separately we could still sit together. What’s so great about jazz is that they take the time to give everyone a solo, not just the lead singer and the musicians really seem to enjoy listening to their partners delivering some superb solo. At some point Kim got the audience to stand up and sing along, which I think is pretty wicked in a 300 year old theatre, it’s usually more of a festival or standing concert venue thing :). Besides some of the great jazz standards there was also some fresh and humorous work written by Ms. Hoorweg herself as well as some rock/pop songs in a jazzy coat (marvellous cover of ‘Message in a Bottle’). Nearly at the end of the concert the workshop people were invited onto the stage to show the audience what they had learned during the workshop. Needless to say it was dead scary, but I did it, and even fairly graciously (I think, I hope) survived my 15 second solo and actually enjoyed it :)
After the concert Steve, Alex and I went to the Asian restaurant on the Beestenmarkt for a ‘quick bite’. Little did we know that the Japanese part of the restaurant is actually a hibachi grill and thus offering 3 hours of entertainment by a skillful chef with knives accompanying a delicious meal. We didn’t mind that it didn’t turn out to be a quick bite, as it was just amazingly good. When I got home at 22:00 I nearly immediately passed out after a hell of a good day.
