19 Jul 2012: How Do You Pronounce "Céilidh"?

19 Jul 2012:

How Do You Pronounce "Céilidh"?

Glasgow, Scotland, UK

H: 16 L: 11 Weather: Mostly Cloudy, Intermittent Rain

Thursday morning came early, or late, or something, because my internal clock was utterly confounded by what on earth was happening in the world.  I had looked the previous night to find a breakfast place.  Unlike the US, though, the concept of a "breakfast place" doesn't seem to exist in Scotland, so instead I found a coffee shop, where I bought a delicious piece of lemon cake and some apple juice and headed to the conference.

The conference venue was this beautiful building on campus that had a large lecture hall and looked like a converted church or something.  It was a pretty awesome venue, actually.  In case you were wondering, the conference itself was the Perspectives on Rhythm and Timing (PoRT) conference, which brought together researchers from speech and music perception.  You might be thinking this sounds like a really odd combination, but, actually, in cognition, it's one that totally makes sense, surprisingly enough, as speech and music are both complex sound signals that share things like rhythm.  And timing.  People there ranged in age/experience from professor on down to... me, pretty much.  I don't think there were any other undergrad-age people there.  People kept assuming I was a postdoc or PhD student, and I was just like "...er, yeah, um, what?"  I think the beard is definitely a good life decision.

My presentation was the first one scheduled from the submitted papers, which made it the first one after lunch.  I was entertained when the person who was running the technical aspects of the conference asked whether I wanted to use the podium microphone or have a portable one: of course I'd want to wander all over the place and flail!  My presentation wasn't the best I've ever made: I was sometimes unclear, went longer than I should have, and wasn't as on my feet during the Q&A as I should have been.  But I was satisfied with how it went, given how discombobulated by exhaustion I was.

(I’m writing at least part of this post from a real life British train!  That’s right, the British kind of British train, the kind that British people ride!  Zomg!  Exclamation points!

Anyway, some of it’s being written on the train, but this post may be somewhat weird, because at least some was written in Google Docs before I left.

OMG WE’RE MOVING.  ON A TRAIN.  TRAIN MOVING.  TRAINY TRAIN TRAIN.

PUBLIC TRANSIT WHAT IS THIS MADNESS.

Anyhow, now that I’m trainy train distracting trainy train train train, train train train, etc.

…)

Right.  Let me just try to continue writing from the point I was at previously.  Maybe?

I had a few music people tell me that my data was very impressive, which is important.  Devin and Laura told me to repeat, over and over again, the patterns of the data in the experiment—

(OMG TWO SEATS IN FRONT OF ME THE TRAIN CONDUCTOR IS GIVING THE CHICK SITTING IN THE SEAT A HARD TIME BECAUSE SHE DIDN’T BUY A TICKET AND SHE SAID “FUCK OFF” THAT IS SO BRITISH I LOVE EVERYTHING)

—and so I did, saying that the fact that lines in the figures didn’t overlap meant that the effect I wanted existed, and pointing out over and over again where the lines didn’t overlap.   I was complemented repeatedly for my pretty data.  If even music people at the very least understood that the pretty data was pretty, that meant I was doing my job.

Then came time for the craziness that was our official conference visit to a restaurant in Glasgow.  I bought the three-course meal, which was a good life decision, because that was the meal that included dessert.  We could choose from one of two options for each choice.  For dessert, I spied “Berry Pavlova”  as one of the options.  Intrigued, I asked those around me whether they knew what it was—

(OH MY GOD A TRAIN JUST PASSED BY.  MULTIPLE TRAINS.  WHAT IS THIS I DON’T EVEN.  AND THE SCENERY.  JUST THE SCENERY.)

—and they had no idea.  But it had “berry” in the name, so it couldn’t be so bad, right?

So here’s what Berry Pavlova is, if you ever happen to be in a position to get it, or at least a close approximation.  Take a vanilla cookie.  A specific kind; I don’t remember what they’re called, but the kind that were always in the bins in the grocery store next to strawberry and chocolate ones.  The kind that was like kind of crunchy and airy and stuff.  Now increase its size by five.  Then, take a whipped cream can.  Spray out half of the whipped cream on the cookie.  Finally, take five strawberries, dice them, and put them on top.  That’s a Berry Pavlova.  It was ridiculous and delicious, because the whipped cream was thick and sweet and so ridiculously creamy.  I was happy.

Next came the céilidh, pronounced [kej.li] (“Kayleigh”) somehow.  (The Celtic languages are probably the only ones with a writing system as awful as English.)  A céilidh is a type of Gaelic dance festival, and I’m guessing it’s the antecedent of the square dance, because it consists of a bunch of dances with dance moves called out by a leader and fiddle music.  Also, a lot of kicking and swinging people around and do-see-doing.

Normally, this would be mildly entertaining, because it would involve dancing and rustic square dances.  This, however, was a céilidh at an academic conference full of rhythm and timing experts, which meant the dancing was, how shall we put this… quite unique.  There were a few plants in the audience, people who had already been to céilidhs, but the rest of us were just kind of groping around to try to figure out what to do.  Gender lines were frequently blurred as nearly everyone took the role of a male or female sometime during the night.  I danced with several professors I would not have been expecting to be the dancing type.  It was loads of fun; everyone was frequently out of breath and giggling and grinning and breaking some of the restaurant’s glasses and pitchers.  (According to the employees, it was an “average night”.)

The worst thing was the lack of air conditioning.  As you might imagine, I was, er, sopped by the end of the night.  For whatever reason, we were ushered out of the room by the songs “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)”, “Auld Lang Synge”, and, finally, in the piece-de-resistance, the “Hokey Pokey”.  By then, there wasn’t really a circle we could be putting ourselves “in” or “out” from, so we made do.  Chatting with some professors after, one posed the existential question of "What if the hokey-pokey really is what it's all about?"  After that,  it was time to go, and I went along with a group to a little pub on a street corner with a small group of potentially big-name music cognition people and the soon-to-be-big-name Molly Henry, who all shared Dayton, Ohio ties.  (I wonder if there’ll be a Dayton theme on this trip.)  There, I had a Strongbow on tap.  Mmm, delicious.