Category Archives: Communication

Feeling Music With your Whole Body

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Amazing Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie (who lost her hearing in her early teens) gave a TED Talk about “Listening To Music With Your Whole Body” – it’s 32 minutes well worth your time.

If someone asks me: “Oh well, how do you hear that?” Then I simply say: “I really don’t know, but I just basically hear that through my body, through opening myself up. How do you hear that?” “Oh well, I hear it through the ears…” …you know…” Well, what do you mean, ‘through the ears’, what are you actually hearing?” So, when you try to bounce the question back to a socalled hearing person, then, they simply do not know how to answer these questions…

There’s also a longer documentary about this, Touch the Sound.

Quick Quotes

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Things that fell out of my mouth today during a meeting:

Inter- means “between groups.” Intra- means “within one group.”  (e.g., “interscholastic competition” means a contest between different schools;”intra-team communications” means talking amongst your teammates)

Get to “yes” first, from all parties involved, to avoid later “no”s.

Escalate responsibly…

Random thought after explaining to a non-IT person how they broke a piece of the internet (though not totally their fault – combining a 1980s app with arcane Exchange 2010 features frequently does not end well):

A key communications skill when explaining tech to nontech users seems to be anthropomorphizing the effect of their actions on the application.