Rocky Starts
Where do I even begin? How about my very first day working at RITMO when I got locked in the building for working too late? What about a Pulp Fiction-esque nonlinear narrative where I start by describing how I had to rewrite the entire third paper of my PhD two days before I turned in my dissertation? Maybe five months into my move when I was finally able to open a Norwegian bank account would be a more appropriate starting place since everyone knows you don’t actually exist in Norway without a debit card and fødselsnummer. But while the road was certainly rocky at times like the icy Oslo sidewalks in winter, the path to my PhD was incredibly rewarding like the hike from Holmenkollen up to Sognsvann and like that hike, you can’t fully appreciate the journey unless you start all the way at the bottom.
Pivoting to my Passion
I had actually wanted to start working in music cognition research since I was a bachelor’s student, but unfortunately David Huron wasn’t taking research assistants at the time and so I took a ~6.5 year detour working in visual attention and cognitive control. It thus probably goes without saying, but I was pretty stoked to come to RITMO and finally start working on research I was passionate about. However, my somewhat late appearance on the music cognition scene came with some growing pains. For example, I didn’t have an intuitive grasp of the literature like I did with my former field and so I spent over a month hunting down basic citations because I wasn’t privy to the “sensorimotor synchronization” keyword I needed; the simple “tapping” just wasn’t cutting it. Thankfully, RITMO’s interdisciplinary work environment provided more than enough colleagues and collaborators to help me navigate this steep learning curve. The first step was…
Forgetting Everything I (Thought I) Knew About Music
RITMO was also my first exposure to the humanities where, in addition to the locals’ Norwegian, I often felt like I was listening to an alien language even in my native American English. Deceptively simple musical concepts I had thought I understood like “syncopation” and “pickups” took on completely new, substantially more nuanced meanings. Numbers stopped elegantly encapsulating all human experience like they had in my visual search and change detection paradigms. Snide remarks about neoliberal capitalism and fascism were suddenly peppered into flash talks and discussions just like Fox News always warned would happen if I went to one of those “Marxist” universities. Like learning how to ski (presumably; I never bothered to learn in the three and a half years I lived here), all the falls and blunders were worth it in the end as I’ve come out a far more critical and well-rounded researcher than I would have had I remained in my monodisciplinary comfort zone.
RITMemories
But enough about work. Norway’s got a substantially healthier work-life balance than I was used to and when Oslo wasn’t locked down, oh boy did I balance out all that working with a lot of living. Countless barbecues in all seasons, weather, and locations around the city from RITMO’s backyard to the top of St. Hanshaugenparken and the islands in the fjord it looked out upon. Untold amounts of strange meats like whale, fermented and pickled fish, reindeer, elk, chicken hearts, and homemade sausages. Thousands of liters (~4 times fewer gallons) of homebrewed beer and mead. Hundreds of ice baths with fewer sauna sessions to counteract them. Dozens of new lifelong friends.
Alas my time (work visa) is up and so I must, på norsk, say “Howdy brah!” – god knows I had it good.
