User:Derekhmartin

Dad, musician, cook, language teacher

Particular interests: music, music theory (including non-ET systems), history, languages, historical linguistics, general linguistics (phonetics, phonology, grammar, morphology, etc.), literature, mathematics, electronics for music, sound recording & audio engineering, acoustics, renewable energy, environmentalism, human rights.

Guitar is my main instrument. I also play harmonica (diatonic), and I have some knowledge of keys, bass, chromatic harmonica, berimbau and various hand percussion. I am good at undertone throat-singing and undertones with overtones, not as good but okay at overtones alone. My background is mostly in various styles of rock music, heading towards weird and out there styles, but I enjoy and try to learn from all styles of music. I love tube amps and analog effects pedals, as well as digital effects and instruments.

I have worked as a teacher of Spanish and English as a Second Language. I understand some Portuguese, French and German, and I am currently studying Russian. I'm also studying Old English (Late West Saxon), but not as intensively.

I like searching for deeper meanings and finding a better understanding of things in the world. I like tracing the threads of transmission through history of ideas, techniques and systems. The genesis of the various languages (both modern and historical), for example, and the concept of a "people" or "nation" united by that language and a unique "culture" is interesting to me. It seems both true and false since "nations" seem to begin as random groupings determined by geography, tribal splits, migration, conquest, etc., but then language, food, dress, music, art, stories and religious beliefs form and follow certain patterns (which then are broken, then re-absorbed, etc.). There is a need for closed systems that require certain arbitrary choices to be set as rules within a defined context (languages, musical styles, art styles, systems of prosody, mythological pantheons, career, etc.), otherwise it would not be possible to produce meaning. Furthermore, these systems do produce beautiful, and often novel, forms, and that is reason enough to support their existence and transmission, yet one should also be conscious enough of its defining assumptions to see beyond the system one is used to working within. Becoming knowledgeable of and fluent in other systems is beneficial, but the entire field of knowledge in all its various forms (Zhuangzi's "ten thousand holes") is far too vast to be attained by a single human. Also the interplay, whether from conscious exploration or random collisions, irrevocably changes existing systems, making them history. This produces the need or desire to preserve historical systems and to (attempt to) rediscover ones that have been lost. Ignoring all this and pretending it is irrelevant (as Americans and other nations resulting from a melting pot, or modern man, free from and charged with forgetting the past, are supposed to) means that you just unconsciously follow the systems that are closest at hand, completely lacking any context that would make you aware that you are, indeed, following various systems that limit your choices.

I love Wikipedia for being a fairly reliable way to dip into knowledge, to explore both its breadth (the wide variety of disciplines and systems present now, or at any given moment) and its depth (their historical development and connections). Hopefully, it will help me to better understand the systems implanted in my head, those in the heads of others, from which I often receive transmissions, and, ultimately, the world outside.