Guest Blogging for Duolingo

At the end of last month, a short piece I wrote for Duolingo was published on their blog. The opportunity arose after catching up with an old friend from my Music, Mind and Brain cohort who now works as their new Music Learning Scientist.

I used to really enjoy writing blogs on topics having to do with music and science (see this blog’s back log from when I was in Louisiana). For the past few years, I have been wanting to try to get my thoughts together explaining some of issues that come up when the words music and universal come up in scientific research. Instead of trying to write a big, long academic article on that (as it’s not really the focus of my current role/responsibilities) I thought that maybe trying to write a more generalist, accessible piece would be a good way to collect and clarify my thinking on it.

Writing for generalist audiences is not my forte by any measure as was made very clear by what I wrote in my first “draft for casual readers” and what ended up on the final post. My first draft was probably twice as long, had several quotations and references that I thought would give the reader a lot of interesting, specific context. All of these were (rightfully, given the audience) chopped from the draft by the editor. Though going through this process did (as I hoped) put some of my thinking in the order as I would like to present it in the future on this topic.

Re-reading the draft now, of course I wish it had all these little details that show I have done my reading on the topic, but I still feel that it gets across the general idea that not only defining what music is can be difficult, but that this entire question needs to be considered from the vantage point of each and every culture that appears in these global searches.

It’s wild that this little, short post will probably be read more than most other things I work on (it’s already been read by 135,000 users and is being translated into a few other languages), but that’s just how it is sometimes.