I’ve been blogging for quite some time, though not always
consistently. I started writing on Blogspot.com in 2006 and
over the years have documented my music and travel adventures.
This continued throughout my PhD and in 2013 I migrated
everything to a Weebly site. Now my website is generated via
markdown + pandoc, and I plan to post content more regularly
on topics related to linguistics.
2026
As part of the “Food of the World” segment in my “Languages of
the World” course at NTU Singapore, I’ve been cooking food
from a region of the world that we discuss, so students get an
idea of pos..
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This is a blog post that I’ve had in mind for awhile, and as I
was working on it I realized that there is a bit of groundwork
needed. Part of that groundwork was laid in a previous post
where I showed..
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As part of the “Food of the World” segment in my “Languages of
the World” course at NTU Singapore, I have been cooking food
from the part of the world we’re discussing that week. The
goal is to gi..
(more)
In a previous post I showed a simple way to control for
language family and area with categorical variables in a
linear mixed model using Python. In a more recent post I
showed how we can plot languag..
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As part of the “Food of the World” segment in my “Languages of
the World” course at NTU Singapore, I cook food from a region
of the world that we’re discussing in that week, so that
students can g..
(more)
When working with languages, it is important to keep in mind
the context in which they exist. While “context” has many
different facets, a primary aspect is geography. Geographical
(and topographi..
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This week’s post is a recipe from Europe. As part of the “Food
of the World” segment in my “Languages of the World” course at
NTU Singapore, I cook food from a linguistic group represented
in that wee..
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I recently attended the annual conference of the Society for
the Science of Motivation (SSM) in Barcelona. Joyce was
presenting a paper about our recent work automating
subcategory coding for implicit..
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I’ve been on holiday and so missed posting a blog for last
week, but this week I again have a post about food. As part of
the “Food of the World” segment in my “Languages of the World”
course at N..
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If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time, you
probably know that I’m interested in languages of the world.
The incredible diversity in linguistic structures found in the
roughly 7,000 wor..
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This week’s post is a recipe from the insular south-east Asian
region of the world. As part of the “Food of the World”
segment in my “Languages of the World” course at NTU
Singapore, I cook food f..
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At my son’s birthday party some weeks ago I was talking to a
few of the other parents while kids were playing, and, as it
does these days, the subject of AI came up. Of the two dads I
spoke to, both..
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As part of my series on “Food of the World”, I’ve been writing
up the recipes for food I cook for my “Languages of the World”
course at NTU Singapore. It’s a course that gives an overview
of world..
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It’s that time of the semester where I’m in the throes of
assessing student work for classes and trying to submit
grades. One of my tasks has recently involved NLP projects
related to the *taggedP..
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As part of my series on “Food of the World”, I’ve been writing
up the recipes for food I cook for my “Languages of the World”
course at NTU Singapore. It’s a course that gives an overview
of world..
(more)
When I began developing the
taggedPBC I needed to
represent all of the roughly 2,000 languages in a similar way,
in order to facilitate comparison. As noted in a previous
post, while the majority of..
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As I noted in a previous post, food is part and parcel of any
fieldwork experience. My “Languages of the World” course at
NTU Singapore gives an overview of world languages,
highlighting theories ..
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Part of my research involves using machine learning and
natural language processing to automate content coding. In
social science there has long been recognition that humans
make inferences about the ..
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The diversity of the world’s languages is driven by a number
of factors that are still not well understood. However, there
is clearly some influence from environment and other kinds of
context. When..
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I sometimes find myself wanting to work on a project involving
data or code from Github. Many such repositories are quite
small and easy to work with, containing mostly text files.
Occasionally, howev..
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When conducting comparative studies on linguistic features, we
are essentially observing patterns. In a previous post I
mentioned one problem we need to deal with, related to how we
represent the feat..
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When working with actual language data, one major concern is
how to represent that data. Many times as researchers the
things we want to compare are not equivalent, so we must use
the best approximati..
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Some colleagues and I recently published a paper updating our
progress on automating the coding of implicit motives. If you
follow my blog and research, I’ve been working with
psychologists on this ..
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Most of my fieldwork research on minority languages has been
conducted within the Austroasiatic (AA) family. This is a
group of languages spoken by diverse peoples across South
& Southeast Asia, and w..
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Recently we wanted to set up an audio transcription endpoint
for our workflow with Bookscribe.ai. I’ve been using
Huggingface in production for their accessible and low cost
inference servers, but t..
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A couple of weeks ago I read a post by Tim Dettmers outlining
how he has tried to use AI to automate various tasks, with
some examples of successes and failures. While his attempt to
automate email wr..
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My interest in languages has led to some interesting places,
working on languages from different families in various
contexts. Most recently I’ve been curious about the ways that
languages develop ove..
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Since 2023 I’ve been teaching a course on natural language
processing at NTU Singapore. The goal is for students to learn
basic Python programming skills that allow them to work with
language data. Ty..
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I recently read a post by Tim Dettmers on how he uses AI to
support his workflow. In case you don’t know of Tim, his work
on quantization has been foundational to how AI has developed
over the past fe..
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2025
About a year ago I was looking for annotated texts to
investigate some questions I had about word order. My main
question was whether it was possible to extract word order
from corpora, but I realized..
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2024
Large language models (LLMs) seem to be all the rage these
days, with the release of ChatGPT last year sparking a lot of
conversation and interest. There have been quite a few efforts
aimed at getting..
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2023
As you might have observed, I recently updated my website.
Although it’s been on my mind for awhile, I finally got around
to it because I had a good template to follow and I’ve learned
enough about bu..
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Last semester I taught an introductory Natural Language
Processing (NLP) course at Nanyang Technological University,
Singapore. I wrote a thread about it on Twitter (now X) but
here is a slightly expa..
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2022
The pandemic has been a bit nuts. Add a new baby on top of a
toddler to all the requisite adjustments required for managing
the new expectations of COVID life, and you have a recipe for
lack of produc..
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2020
The past week has been quite exciting, as we’ve been in the
final stages of preparing a final manuscript on machine
learning. I’ve been rather quiet about this collaboration
since the end of 2017, wha..
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2019
Things have been quite busy over the last year or so, when I
last posted. My wife and I moved to Zurich with our 4-month
old, I helped organize a workshop on word order here at UZH, a
proceedings volu..
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Planting rice near Jowai, NE India At the end of last year the
ICAAL 7 proceedings volume was published by University of
Hawai’i Press as a special issue of the Journal of the
South-East Asian Lingui..
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2018
I just returned from fieldwork in Myanmar, where we spent
several days training staff and students at two different
universities (Mandalay University and Yangon University of
Foreign Languages) in fie..
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The last post was a bit of a brain dump to make sure I didn’t
forget a few lessons I learned, in part because I knew I was
quitting the job that involved doing ML type things. While I
was working ther..
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2017
I have been quite lax with posting here mainly because I have
been working very hard on a difficult problem. My current job
involves (among other things) trying to automate a
psychological coding syst..
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One of the concerns that has occupied my mind for that past
few years is the question of data accessibility in the field
of Linguistics. I am happy to announce that the data that
underpins my grammati..
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In a previous post I discussed some of the benefits I
discovered in using LaTeX with LyX as a front-end. Another
extremely useful tool to learn how to use is a Bibliography
manager. If you are like I..
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One of the first things I did after passing my PhD
confirmation exercise (like a qualifying exam in the USA) was
to research the best way to write my thesis. As a side note, I
use the word ‘thesis’ to..
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My next post was intended to be about streamlining a workflow
by using various LaTeX authoring tools and a bibliography
manager, but last week my Mac died. It is an older computer
admittedly (from 201..
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Along the lines of some of my previous posts on tools for
linguistic analysis, I thought I’d post a quick update on a
Praat script I’ve been working on. While not part of the
series of posts I’ve been..
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Recently, I started to explore using Git to maintain and
organize my data. This includes both the primary data I work
from as a linguist and the various kinds of data I produce in
the form of written ..
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This is the fourth installment in a series of blog posts where
I discuss some of the tools I use for linguistic analysis. In
a previous post I described the tools I use for processing and
converting v..
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In this third post about linguistic tools, I’ll be discussing
software that I use for acoustic analysis. Praat is one of the
premier acoustic analysis tools available for computers. While
there are pr..
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When you discuss doing language documentation and description,
one of the first things to know is that you have to collect
language data. The primary source of language data is people
who speak the la..
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When I started my PhD program in Linguistics (language
documentation and description), I had some experience with
linguistic analysis, but not to the degree that I had to learn
in order to complete my..
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Just a quick blog post to mention that one of the tools I use
in language documentation and description, Transcriber, is
newly repackaged for use with OS X El Capitan! This is a big
deal because previ..
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Recently I’ve been thinking about what I wish I knew about PhD
study before I began. When you start out to do a PhD, there
are many things you have to learn that are not necessarily
directly related t..
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This website is newly updated! I just redesigned the layout
and will be making it a bit more writing-oriented over the
coming days and weeks. The reason for this is because of a
realization that while..
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This is my first update in a long while, as I notice that this
blog hasn’t been updated since 2015. I blame life and the ease
of posting short updates on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
Since my l..
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2015
This is the final installment of my review of the Hanvon
e920 (PLUS) - you can read Part 1 (my reasoning behind
purchasing it) HERE and Part 2 (how I got it and changed the
language mode) HERE. In..
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This is Part 2 of my review of the Hanvon e920 e-reader (mine
is the PLUS version, which I think is the second generation),
Part 1 of which is HERE. When we left off I was describing my
reasoning for ..
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The last year has been quite busy - I completed my PhD, got
hired on a 1-year contract as a postdoctoral Research Fellow,
and have since returned to India and done many other things.
Needless to say, ..
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The last few months I’ve been a bit lax in posting, in part
because things have been quite busy. In January I presented at
a workshop in Nijmegen, and most of February-April was spent
editing and resu..
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2014
Signs on a protest barrier. Protest at Central. Hong Kong
street. After the Philippines I spent a couple of days in
Singapore to relax, and the next stop was Hong Kong. My friend
Matt and I had the of..
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I promised a few updates of my travels, and I’m off to
Indonesia this weekend, so I figured I’d better write a couple
blog posts this week. First up: CEBU! This always reminds me
of the Veggie Tales s..
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I’ve been traveling a lot the last few weeks, holidaying in
Cebu (where I learned how to scuba dive, which was fabulous)
and Hong Kong, and I’m off to Indonesia next week. My church
also released a ne..
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A couple weekends ago I went to Phuket, Thailand with some
friends. We found a really great deal and just decided to go
for it. Initially it was just four, but then two friends
wanted to come, and two..
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Well now that I’ve submitted my thesis I have been happily
doing other things than writing. Among which, moving house
(I’m staying with a friend for a couple months), planning
adventures, hanging out ..
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I finally submitted my PhD thesis last week. It has been a
crazy final month. The reason I had that deadline was that
here in Singapore (at least at NTU) all PhD students are given
4 years of funding ..
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I haven’t had much time for blogging recently, since it’s
crunch time on my thesis. I was working even on the brief
holiday (that’s ‘vacation’ for all you Americans) I took to
the US for my brother’s ..
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In my last post I discussed the concept of deixis and
illustrated deictic demonstratives in Pnar. Pnar’s deictic
demonstrative system combines gender clitics with largely
distance-based deictic morp..
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At the Himalayan Languages Symposium last week I gave a talk
about deixis. This grammatical feature is essentially
‘pointing’, and words or morphemes in language can point to
various things, so gramma..
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I mentioned that Dr. Anvita Abbi gave a great talk at the
Himalayan Languages Symposium on her work on Great Andaman in
the Indian Ocean. Here’s a map just to show you where that is.
credit: [B..
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Yesterday afternoon I gave a talk at the Himalayan Languages
Symposium, which was held this year at NTU. It’s the 20th
meeting, and has generally focused on languages of the
Himalayan region, which is..
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Last week I had a Eureka!* moment. I love these moments - when
you’ve been trying to figure out a problem (could be big,
could be small) and it is frustrating you to no end, and then
finally you brea..
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I realize that some of my posts haven’t been as clear as they
could be. Specifically, I talked a lot about interlinearized
texts, but what does that actually mean? Well, the thing about
language is th..
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So my team did not make it through to the next round. They
played a good game against Portugal last night, but it just
wasn’t good enough. Too much ball control, not enough
finishing power. A ton of m..
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As I’ve been working with code to try and do some programming
to get the computer to format my text properly, I’ve run into
some issues. It’s got me thinking… You know how computers
think… wait, y..
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This past week I’ve been attending a workshop on the
linguistic notion of Affectedness that my co-supervisor
Frantisek Kratochvil organized. It has really helped me think
about possible ways this feat..
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I’m beginning to explore the local music scene here in
Singapore, and this past Thursday I went to the open mic night
at The Beast. The restaurant and bourbon bar has a great
southern country feel wit..
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For the past week or so I’ve been working on getting my corpus
of transcribed and translated texts into shape. The word
corpus is from the Latin word meaning “body”, and in
this case refers to a “bo..
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This morning I was sweeping the kitchen while the washing
machine was on and swept behind the machine, pulling the drain
hose out of the way. A few minutes later, after taking out the
trash, I returne..
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So I’ve been lax for the past few months in updating this
blog. I guess I’ve been a bit busy with other things. That’s
my excuse anyway. A 500-page dissertation to write, an
undocumented language to d..
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2013
My new Christmas EP is out! Get it on Bandcamp and soon on
iTunes and elsewhere. All proceeds from the album go toward
hurricane reconstruction and rebuilding efforts in the
Philipines via Gawad Kalin..
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I recently had the opportunity to attempt to condense my PhD
thesis topic into 3 minutes as part of the 3-minute thesis
challenge here at NTU. I made it into the final where I
competed with other spea..
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Wandering salesman inscribing pens on the train. I made it
safely to Kathmandu this week, via train from Guwahati to
Gorakhpur, then north to the Nepal border and by bus to Tansen
for a couple days to..
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I’ve been enjoying hanging out with friends here in Jowai.
Yesterday evening I snapped this photo (on my iPhone, so no
actual shutter to snap) at Syntu Ksiar, just as the sun was
disappearing behind t..
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Enjoying a pipe Most of you probably know that the 4th of July
is only celebrated in the USA and wherever its citizens gather
around the world. Well, being the only citizen in at least a
100-mile radi..
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Playing cards on the Majuli ferry. I’m in Meghalaya at the
moment, enjoying the hospitality of my friends in Jowai. On my
way here I visited friends on Majuli, the largest river island
in the world, w..
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I’ve been in Bangkok for the last few days, attending the
SouthEast Asian Linguistics Society conference here at
Chulalongkorn University. The campus is in the center of
Bangkok and rather easy to get..
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I am back in Singapore! It’s been a crazy few weeks, and I’m
still recovering from jet lag, one reason I haven’t posted
much recently or sent out an email. My Granddad on my mother’s
side passed away ..
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I’ve just been informed by friends who subscribe to World
magazine that an article about my music has appeared in the
most recent print edition! How exciting! I must admit that I
knew it would probabl..
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I’ve been reflecting a bit on this season, which comes around
once a year. As I write this, I’m really enjoying the holiday
podcast from Under the Radar, which features some excellent
music for the we..
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I’ve been in Australia (affectionately known by locals as Oz
or ’stralia) for almost 3 weeks, and so far it’s been
fabulous. People are friendly, food is good and I’ve already
seen 2 incredible firewo..
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Anthony “Tony” Guyer was one of the first people I worked with
when starting to play music. Over the years we’ve worked
together on numerous projects and I’ve always valued his ear
and his feedback. H..
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This Lamp by Hiram Ring Sorry for the lack of posting recently
- I am on a short (two-month) trip to Australia, and will be
continuing to work on my thesis and music and such while I’m
here. I only ju..
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You can now get `Home’ on iTunes, AmazonMP3, Spotify, or
pretty much anywhere else you purchase your digital music! And
of course you can buy it on Bandcamp as well. I haven’t had a
chance to work ou..
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I first met Yolanda and her sister Sophia in Quarryville, PA,
at the Coffee Bean, a small coffee shop in the town, back in
2006 when I was starting to play shows in the Lancaster area.
I got to know t..
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Over the coming weeks I plan to feature different people or
groups of people who have helped make this album a reality.
And where better to start than with the people I first started
working with in S..
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Happy Valentine’s Day! In true Valentine’s spirit, Tunecore
has put together a compilation (or 3) for all the lovers out
there. My song, “I’ve Got a Girl” competed with over 1,000
other songs for a sp..
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The new album ‘Home’ is almost here! I’m still working on the
artwork with my friend Janina, so it’s not completely done
yet, but for now you can pre-order the digital version on
Bandcamp: http://hira..
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I’ve been reminded this week of my mortality. It’s always good
to be reminded of the big picture, that my life is simply a
part of the tapestry of humanity, of life. But when someone
you know dies une..
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This album is mostly composed of songs I wrote in 2009/2010
and recorded guitar and vocals for in my first semester at NTU
in Singapore, at SoundFarm Production Studios. It has just
taken a while to f..
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I’ve thought about this album for awhile as a collection of
songs, and of course one of the big questions is “what do I
call it?”. For a variety if reasons that I hope will become
apparent, I’ve decid..
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Some really great news - the album is being authored now! For
those who don’t know, the process of authoring is the final
stage which music goes through before before it is ready to be
pressed or repl..
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So this is my first official post of the new year, and also my
first post on the new blog which is integrated with my
website. I like the idea of having everything in one location,
so everyone who wan..
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