Teresa Nakra, Exploring Music through Culture, Technology, & Creative Coding

 

92-172 Teresa Nakra

SPEAKERS

Will Bachman, Teresa Nakra

 

Will Bachman  00:00

Will hello and welcome to the 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host, Will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Teresa Marin Nakr, who we knew in college as Teresa Marin. Teresa, welcome to the show.

 

Teresa Nakra  00:22

Thank you, Will, so much. And thank you for the opportunity to reflect on 30 plus years since Harvard.

 

Will Bachman  00:30

So, Teresa, tell us about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

Teresa Nakra  00:34

All right, well, I’ll start by saying I was a music major at Harvard, and my area of interest at that time was conducting, and I had had some opportunities conducting operas and orchestras at Harvard, and loved that, and was kind of in a phase where I was questioning where to take that, what to do with with that moving forward, and so I decided to apply for a fellowship, which some of you may recognize. It was the Michael C. Rockefeller Fellowship, and there were five fellows from our class of 92 including Richard Buerier and Rachel Berger and others. And so my proposal was to go to India for a year and study Indian classical music, and it was a way to kind of give myself some time to kind of think about whether, whether grad school or what, you know, what to do with this music thing in my life, and so I went to India all by myself in September of 1992 and I spent 10 months in India studying music with a practitioner of North Indian classical music. Spent time in the kind of in the tradition, you know. After some few months, moved into his family home, lived with the family, spent time in what they call the Guru Shishya Parampara, which is the relationship between teacher and student in the traditional mode, and I really just spent a year doing something completely different from what I had experienced at Harvard, and it was very refreshing, you know, really gave me time to think about what I wanted to do with my life and explore something that was endlessly fascinating to me. Okay,

 

Will Bachman  02:26

now what was your instrument or instruments at Harvard? And before, what were you playing before India?

 

Teresa Nakra  02:33

I grew up playing the violin, and I had grown up playing in youth orchestras, and then in the Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra, and had studied with musicians in the Boston Symphony and the New York Philharmonic and other places, so I, I had a pretty strong background in classical violin performance, and so I studied. I took that violin to India, and every day practiced for hours, and took these long one on one lessons in the Indian tradition, where my teacher would sing the raga segment to me, and I would play it back and try to capture it as faithfully as possible, and in that way I learned 40 ragas over the course of the of the year.

 

Will Bachman  03:14

Wow, so you were your instrument in India, what you were playing the violin, Indian classical music on the violin is is the violin a normal kind of instrument for Indian classical music.

 

Teresa Nakra  03:29

It was introduced in the 1500s by the Portuguese, so it had been incorporated into their classical traditions, both in the north and the south. So it was a good instrument to have. If I had been playing the saxophone, it might have been a different thing, but the violin integrated well into the system, and it was prized, I was told, for its vocal qualities.

 

Will Bachman  03:53

Okay, so and tell us a bit more about what was, what were you learning there? How is it different than your previous training in terms of like what was what did you know after that year that that is there like improvisation going on or is it different chord structures or different fingerings or different, you know, tonalities, or like, what.. what was kind of the learning.

 

Teresa Nakra  04:28

Well, I’ll say that coming from kind of a Harvard education, where we were steeped in Western tonal harmony and orchestras and orchestration, and thinking about music, both vertically and horizontally, counterpoint and harmonic progressions. Indian classical music is structured very differently, so it has a drone that kind of provides the foundation, or the kind of the tonic, and then above it you have these lovely. Melodic lines that cascade improvisationally, and so I was learning a lot of new things around melodic improvisation, contrapuntal kind of organization of tone, and also thinking about lining that up within an improvisational structure that has some framework, but also some space to play, and it was really.. it was wonderful to think that you know a whole different society had organized music in an entirely different way.

 

Will Bachman  05:32

You mentioned that you did a lot of thinking that year. How did that manifest? Were you writing in a journal for an hour a day, or tell. tell me, tell us, sort of, how that, what was, what was going on there.

 

Teresa Nakra  05:48

Well, I’ll say I was, I was a pen pal with Rachel Burger, who was in Zimbabwe at the time, so that was really cool to send letters back and forth to Zimbabwe, and to hear about Rachel’s experiences. So, shout out to Rachel, that was wonderful, but yes, a lot of journaling. I also would, I had a tape recorder, so I would kind of turn on the tape recorder and kind of improvise and think about, you know, compose new work that I hadn’t, I’d never kind of worked in that way before. I had always kind of read music off the sheet and was learning how to kind of, you know, create my own melodic lines, so I was doing some, some composition. I have, I have boxes of old tapes from India, and I, you know, I was, I was writing a lot, yeah, on my own, and thinking about, I did eventually apply to graduate school from India, which, that was, you know, allowed me to think cast forward about what I wanted to do.

 

Will Bachman  06:48

Alright, we’ll play the story forward. What happened after India?

 

Teresa Nakra  06:52

So, so I came back. Well, before then, in about March of 93 I got a phone call from one of the places I had applied. Todd Mcover called me from MIT to say that he had read my application and thought it was interesting and potentially had a spot for me, and you know, said, ‘When you come back from India, give me a call, come to the lab and check it out. So that was one of the first things I did in July of 93 when I came home was to travel up to Boston and check out the the media lab and look at the kinds of new technologies that were available for for music making, so it was I kind of like made two very big right turns, right? I went to India and then I went to MIT and and I did end up enrolling at MIT, and I was there for six and a half years, kind of at that time in the mid late 90s, inventing all kinds of new technology for music making, and

 

Will Bachman  07:51

I see that one of the things that you developed was a conductor’s jacket. Tell us about that.

 

Teresa Nakra  07:57

Yeah, and that was my first time getting to work with Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops, so as you know, as I mentioned, I had a real strong interest in conducting, and I had decided not to go into grad school to actually learn conducting and become a conductor, but, but that nonetheless, that curiosity was abiding, and you know, so, and sorry about the the horn in the background, but hopefully it’s not too loud, I can’t hear

 

Will Bachman  08:27

it, so perfect,

 

Teresa Nakra  08:28

perfect, good,

 

Will Bachman  08:29

we call that podcast very day, so it’s true life, true life podcast

 

Teresa Nakra  08:34

sound, sound will not be stopped, but so I was curious about conducting, and what made conducting work, and I had had some conversations in college about what really are the gestures conveying, but I had never really sat down to think about how one would measure that, but being at MIT, that was the sort of thing that we were encouraged to do, so I started to brainstorm how could we put sensors on conductors and figure out what do their arm movements actually mean, and, and how can they be interpreted from a kind of procedural, quantitative point of view. So, I built this sensor jacket. It had not only motion sensors and position sensors, but also physiological monitoring devices: heart rate, skin conductance, respiration rate, muscle tension, so it was like 20 sensors in the jacket, and because of my previous studies with the Boston Symphony Orchestra violinists, I was able to get access to ask someone if, if Keith would mind wearing the jacket, and he was very gracious to say yes, so my first big concert with the Boston Pops was with Keith wearing a sensor jacket and a big screen projecting his data above the orchestra. That’s so cool. That was my PhD project.

 

Will Bachman  09:55

So, you were, you’re probably the old guard of the self-monitoring device. Is right.

 

Teresa Nakra  10:01

Yes, before your Apple Watch, you could have worn my conductor’s jacket,

 

Will Bachman  10:05

and, and then, what did you learn from that? Did you, was that able to get insights into what the conductor’s doing that were new or interesting in some way?

 

Teresa Nakra  10:17

Yeah, I mean, in addition to being able to parse out that conductors use force, muscular force, in their gestures to indicate important expressive ideas. You know, there were other things I learned about how they use isometric contractions to indicate moments of emphasis, and how they use muscle tension in ways that are still a little bit mysterious. You know, how they might hold a gesture, but without tension, and that means one thing, and then they hold a gesture with tension, and that has a completely different result. I also put the jacket on students, and was able to show that students have a lot more kind of stochastic, you know, unnecessary signals flowing around in their movements that professional conductors have learned to refine over the years, so professional gestures signals look much cleaner,

 

Will Bachman  11:09

so it could be real learning device for people to get feedback on what they’re doing,

 

Teresa Nakra  11:13

it could, it could, yeah, yeah, and to be continued.

 

Will Bachman  11:18

Alright, so

 

Speaker 1  11:19

then,

 

Will Bachman  11:19

and I gotta ask also about your, your digital baton and being a musical coach to Penn and Teller.

 

Teresa Nakra  11:25

So, the Penn and Teller project was one that was right when I was a new graduate student at MIT, and my professor, Todd Mackover, had a project with them, and he had written a mini opera that they were learning to perform, and the, we had like four months to get to the performance, so my job was to be their, their coach. I drove to New York and met with each of them several hours a day, and at that time they were living in New York, and you know, it was, it was, it was hilarious, their characters, and this was summer of 94 I think, and I guess maybe my favorite story from that was that Penn was dating Debbie Harry at the time, so one day after rehearsal he said, “Hey, you want to join Debbie Harry and me? We’re going to go to the Tavern on the Green and see this concert, and I was like, “I don’t really want to be the third wheel with you guys. How about can I bring a friend? So I brought a good friend of mine who just thought it was like the wildest night, but anyway, it was great. We had a great time. They were super cool, fun to hang out with them, and they just made the work very fun. I still enjoy seeing them on TV. I haven’t been in touch with them in a long time, but they were great fun to work with,

 

Will Bachman  12:42

so what happens after MIT? You got your PhD, and what happens then?

 

Teresa Nakra  12:48

So, a newly minted PhD, I, you know, I, I spent a few years as a freelance music technologist in the Boston area. I didn’t immediately start working anywhere in particular, but I started my own nonprofit organization. We did music production, for, you know, for contract for things. We did museum exhibits. I built a children’s museum exhibit in Boston that allowed kids to conduct the Boston Pops again, the pops on a big screen in a kiosk, and they waved a little sensor baton at the screen, and the the orchestra slowed down and speeded up, depending on how they were moving. So that was one project, and I got to be an artist in residence back at Harvard again in 2002 where I presented a concert in the Adams House Pool theater, and so for those from Adams House, may remember the pool swimming in that infamous pool, which we loved so much, and I was back there, actually in the pool with it drained out as the stage for for presentation of kind of electronic and sensor-based music, so those are some things I got to do in the years after finishing my PhD, and then eventually I, I had, we had our first child, my husband and I decided that it was time to get a real job, and so I got an offer at college, the College of New Jersey in Central Jersey. I got a tenure-track job, and so I, I moved to New Jersey in 2005 and have been teaching and working in higher ed ever since.

 

Will Bachman  14:33

Okay. And what, what were you teaching? What kind of..

 

Teresa Nakra  14:38

I was the first music technologist hired in a music department in its 100 year history, and so my job was to kind of take the curriculum into the 21st century to teach electronic music and use a composition and production recording, and so all of the little kind of elements of music technology. I built out there. I was there for 19 years. Created a minor, helped create a whole program called Design and Creative Technology that became a department, and I just.. I loved my work there. I loved working with students, and kind of bringing the tools of modern music production, and sensors, and software, and you know, showing students how to find their own creativity through those tools.

 

Will Bachman  15:26

Okay, so I’d like to know a little bit more about what music technology means. So, because I don’t want to make assumptions about, take me down one level, what are the different. if there’s six or eight or nine categories within that of different things, like, oh, recording equipment is one, or sensors is another. What are the different kind of categories within Music technology? If you’re breaking it down for people, you know, Dewey Decimal System style, one one level at a time.

 

Teresa Nakra  15:58

Well, I get, I get. Thank you for asking about it. I guess the first big dividing line there is, are you more technologist or more musician? Right, so if you’re more technologist, then you might be doing audio engineering, digital signal processing, coding, computer science, like machine learning for music, and of course AI for music. Now, so there’s that piece of things, and then on the creative side, if you’re more of a musician and a creative person, then it’s more composition and audio production, songwriting, arranging, and working with software to create electronic music, dance music, EDM, that kind of thing, writing music for films and video games and other media, so

 

Will Bachman  16:44

the technology part of composing is that it’s not my world. I imagine that there’s tools that make it a lot easier than the old days of writing one note at a time, like where you could maybe play something on the piano, and then it will then figure out what notes those were and just put it on the score sheet for you, or stuff like that, or what are the different aspects of composing technology?

 

Teresa Nakra  17:08

Right. So, well, great question, and you know, in comparison to what we were doing back in the late 80s, early 90s at Harvard, you know, writing music on paper with piano keyboards in front of us right now we have what we call DAWs, which are digital audio workstations like Pro Tools or Logic or Ableton, and those are, you know, impressive software engines that allow you to do multi-track composition and recording, and you can do that composition by clicking into little grids, and you know, writing your notes kind of digitally with your mouse, or playing on a midi keyboard and recording it in, or setting up a setup with mics, and you know, and and patch bays, and recording equipment to sort of stream it into your DAW, so there there’s kind of a plethora of different ways of doing it, and it sort of depends on your personal style, which way you want to go.

 

Will Bachman  18:08

Okay, and what, what’s maybe your areas of your particular passion for you? Are there like specialty areas within that that you’re excited about.

 

Teresa Nakra  18:24

I, my, my heart is in human musicians. People always ask, you know, why? Why take away the human part of music making? And my answer is, I, I don’t have to, right? Like, I, I. So, for me, the interesting part is leveraging some of the natural things we do as humans and finding ways to use that data in real time, you know. For example, let me give the example of the concert the last time I collaborated with the Boston Pops, which was our 25th reunion, right, a couple years ago in Symphony Hall, and there John Milbower, who you interviewed, played a beautiful piano concerto, right, with the with the orchestra, and some of you may remember that there was a kind of animation above his, his head, right, there’s this screen, and what I, so what I was asked to do was to take the audio data that was coming out of off microphones on the stage and convert that to signals that could then be interpreted in a kind of like a real time fantasia sort of way, so so for me the excitement is how do you take a great artist like John, and you know, do something with the signal that that leverages it in a different way. So, for me, that was at that particular time it was a visual representation of of the sound in the animation itself.

 

Will Bachman  19:57

In addition to your teaching, it’s. Sounds like you’ve been busy with the family as well. Yes, you do any stuff on the side of, like, doing projects to help you know more consulting capacity or creative capacity, doing composing or doing technology for museums, or continuing into that, any of that work

 

Teresa Nakra  20:22

in recent years, you know, as my children have grown, so, so my kids are now 24 and 18, so they’re, they’re, you know, moving, my youngest is moving into college this year. Thank you. So, I, you know, being a working mom, aside from teaching, that there isn’t a huge amount of time, but I have sat on some boards that are focused on creativity, education, music, that kind of thing, so like the local youth orchestra, the Greater Princeton Youth Orchestra. I’ve been very involved with them for years, local Ed Foundation boards, and my nonprofit, which I led until a few years ago. So I did continue to do some work, I was that children’s museum exhibit that I did in Boston many years ago. Different iterations of it have come and gone over the years, and you know, I’ve made different versions of it for children’s museums all over the country. So that’s been fun to continue to do museum exhibits, but in recent years, now I’m, you know, I wrote a book that came out two years ago, and that that became a kind of a new area for me, that was kind of combining coding at creative coding and music theory, and sort of teaching a method for how you could learn music foundations and fundamentals through the process of writing procedural algorithms, and so that’s been kind of a, like, a new, new area that I’ve been mining, and yeah, we’ll see where that leads. I think, I think, for me, education and education around creativity is really a high, of high importance to me right now, because I think creativity is can be very therapeutic for all of us when we go through, you know, the challenges of life, and so finding ways to teach it and give young people a chance to explore their own creativity is gives me a lot of joy and a lot of meaning.

 

Will Bachman  22:13

Okay, so let’s, let’s give the book a proper plug here: constructing music, musical explorations in creative coding. Yes, we’ll include a link to that book in the, in the show notes. Tell us a little bit more about the book. What, what, who’s it for, and what does that mean? Musical explorations and creative coding.

 

Teresa Nakra  22:35

Well, so this, this idea is to kind of make plain how music is a procedural art form, and that algorithms work in very similar ways to musical structures, and, and the idea was to, in a way, in the post-COVID era, to meet students where they are. So, in these last few years, I think students have spent a lot of time on their devices, many of them have been making music on their devices, and not really necessarily engaging with traditional forms of music making in the same way, and so this was a way to meet those students, try to teach them a little bit of music theory, and also teach them how to code in a way that would allow them to explore their musical ideas, and so that’s what the book does. It’s, it’s got a series of little code snippets that you can run for free on your own laptop, and kind of read a little section of the book, and then try out a little bit of the, the, you know, the code sample, and then you can modify the code samples to suit your own imagination, and it’s intended, hopefully, to be a kind of a textbook for the future music students coming in the decades ahead.

 

Will Bachman  23:51

Now, I can’t think of the exact name, but I, I’ve seen there’s tools that have emerged that help non-musicians place a music. Now I’m not talking about the AI tools that will just create the whole song for you, but I think there’s some tools that you know, if you’re not a musician, you could almost like an app play, like a video game or something, and make music out of it. Tell us about any of that that you’re been engaged with, and your thoughts about that kind of music technology for the non-trained musician.

 

Teresa Nakra  24:27

Well, I’ll say, in the last couple years at Stevens Institute of Technology, my, my tools have become much more sophisticated, so I don’t necessarily spend as much time with those as I used to, but let me take it back a few years, if you remember, Guitar Hero, there was a lot of hand-wringing around the time that that became popular, because I think people were concerned that it was taking people away from learning the guitar, but what turned out to be true was that playing Guitar Hero actually transferred, those skills were transferable and. Learning the techniques on Guitar Hero actually caused a lot of young people to want to learn to study the guitar, and a

 

Will Bachman  25:08

gateway drug, a

 

Teresa Nakra  25:09

gateway drug, exactly. So I think some of those concerns are misplaced, in the sense of worrying that it will split people’s attention. Of course, of course, there are many ways in which technology is a real problem, but I think any of the tools that are available for learning how to be musical or explore your creativity are, you know, are worth trying, if nothing else. And one can always, if you find them a little bit too facile or a little bit not quite the right thing, you can always go back to the piano, right, with a violin or or the voice, and those are all I would just encourage people to try all of it, like not not be afraid of any one particular technology. In fact, one of the things we say in my field is that all music is technology. I mean, aside from the human voice, everything was invented to help us make sound.

 

Will Bachman  26:01

Now I am a call it defunct music student. I took six or seven years of violin lessons when I was a kid and stopped playing it in high school. I was not very good, and then I also took a couple years of piano, and stop playing it, and a couple years of saxophone that I enjoyed more, but I also not didn’t get very good, so didn’t get very good at three instruments. I’m curious, are there better ways now? You know, in terms of technology, in terms of practice, have there been productivity improvements in the, in the world of teaching people to play an instrument, are there? If would I have had a better chance today, like, is there better techniques or tools, or or technology, or methods, or anything than what I was taught in the, you know, 80s, and so forth.

 

Teresa Nakra  26:59

There are definitely several tools that that have come around in the last few years. One is called Smart Music, which has been adopted by a lot of elementary, middle, and high school band directors for students to practice, and I believe it was invented by Roger Dannenberg and Carnegie Mellon, and one of the kind of notable features of that software was that it would actually detect the pitch of what you were playing into the microphone, and it could show you graphically how far out of tune you were from the intended pitch, and my parents would

 

Will Bachman  27:36

have appreciated that, particularly with the violin,

 

Speaker 1  27:38

that would have

 

Will Bachman  27:39

been helpful,

 

Teresa Nakra  27:40

because pitch perception is one of those mysterious things, it’s hard to figure out whether, in fact, you, you’re hearing correctly, because it’s, it’s so internal, right, it’s hard to get a sense of self-confidence around pitch perception, so having a visual reference, I think, can be very helpful, so that’s a good one, but I think a lot of students complain about it. I think they feel like they’d rather just, they’d rather not have to, like, you know, I think part of the problem of systems like Smart Music is they send your data to your teacher, so your teacher can see how much you’re practicing and how accurately you’re practicing, and I think that piece of it is perhaps more problematic for obvious reasons,

 

Will Bachman  28:23

that probably would have been helpful for me. All right, so let’s turn to, let’s, let’s, let’s turn to the next segment. Tell me a bit about any personal habits that you have intentionally adopted at some point over the last 10 or 20 years. What are they, and would you recommend them to others?

 

Teresa Nakra  28:48

Oh, wow. Well, as a faculty member at an institution of higher education, certain times of year can be stressful. The spring semester always feels like it ramps up to a very high level, and so one thing that helps me a lot is to take a regular walk in nature, if possible, and I’m lucky to live near a state park where I can walk as far as I want to walk, so you know, for me, getting outside, you know, breathing fresh air, that’s a critical part of my mental health, especially during those intense times of the semester. And to me, it’s a good wellness habit that I treasure. In fact, I just walk right before this. This conversation,

 

Will Bachman  29:37

tell us about a compliment that you received that has stayed with you.

 

Teresa Nakra  29:42

Oh, wow. Oh, my goodness. I tend to forget compliments. That’s funny. Yeah, well, I think I’ll say I’ve, I’ve been in a new job in recent years and worried about changing jobs at this age and at this stage, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised to get compliments about how things are going, and so what I’ve taken from that is that it’s, it’s okay to take a risk in 150s’s and to try to keep growing and keep striving. So, I’ll just say that I’ve enjoyed making a job change, and I’ve been, I think, getting good feedback, and I, I hope that I, I could encourage others. If you’re considering making a change, that it’s not too late.

 

Will Bachman  30:48

Tell us about any courses or professors that you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you in some way.

 

Teresa Nakra  30:55

Awesome, I’ve been looking forward to this question. I have, I’ll try to say two favorite professors from college, because they mean a lot to me. And the first one I’ll name is Graham Boone, who is a professor in the music department during our time at Harvard. He’s now a professor of musicology at Ohio State University, and later, after we graduated, he happened to marry a member of our class, Gabrielle Burton. So, I’d like to shout out to Gabrielle, who, who I think so highly of. Graham, I say, I never formally took a course with Graham, but he just had such an inspiring attention to the social dynamic in the department, he encouraged students, he met with them one on one, he talked with us in groups, he encouraged communication across us, he gave terrific lectures, and he remained a good friend in the years after college, he played at my wedding, he was remarkable as just a very socially engaged faculty member, and I realized in retrospect how much that mattered to me to know that there was someone in the department who really cared about my experience and the experience of my peers, and that I try to give that level of care in my own teaching, and I think of him often, even though I’ve been out of touch. So this podcast is going to prompt me to get back in touch with Graham and let him know how much he influenced me.

 

Will Bachman  32:31

Well, I will say Litton Arts B 70 jazz history, his American jazz, that that was a big impact on me. I didn’t become a jazz musician, but that permanently really gave me the ability to enjoy listening to jazz music, where it might have been kind of a bit mysterious to me. It gave that enough of an opening, so that I’ve been able to enjoy that genre of music and have some access to it. So I’m very grateful for that course.

 

Teresa Nakra  33:00

I sat in on a couple of those lectures, and his lecture on Billie Holiday was just like life-changing. I don’t know if you remember that one, but

 

Will Bachman  33:07

I do.

 

Teresa Nakra  33:08

Yeah, awesome. He also taught a world music class, which I also did not take for some dumb reason, but he inspired me to go to India. I mean, you know, by, you know, there was one world music class in the curriculum at Harvard at that time, and it was sort of a smorgasbord of all the different cultures sort of smooshed into one, and but he, you know, his his voice in the department around the importance of understanding music outside of the European art music tradition was really helpful, and I’ll add, I’ll add one other professor, Jan Swafford, who class Harvard class of 68 who happened to be a Mellon fellow at the time when we were college students, and he taught a freshman seminar that also was life changing about American music and you know the evolution of homegrown American traditions like jazz, like soul, like swing, like all of the, all of the main kind of American innovations in music, and he showed us how they kind of evolved over time, from our very earliest history, you know, pre in colonial days all the way up to at that time the 90s, you know. Well, I guess it was freshman seminar, so late 80s, but he was, he was just remarkable, and he’s remained a mentor and friend, and you know, has been someone I go back to all the time when I have questions. He’s an author, and so he advised me on my book, and just a, just a wonderful person to stay in touch with over many, many years, so yet again a faculty member who kind of took the time to have a personal connection with a student that I really value over many, many years.

 

Will Bachman  34:56

Tell us about your own personal music, listening, what. What do you listen? Are you a Spotify person or iTunes person or a vinyl person? And and what kind of music are you listening to? If we look at your equivalent of Spotify raft, what would we be seeing your own listening?

 

Teresa Nakra  35:15

Well, you’ll, you’ll smile, because you know, like a lot of people who work professionally in music, I don’t actually listen as much as you might think, kind of recreationally, but having said that, there are a few things I go back to all the time, you know, Brahms piano quartets and trios, you know, some orchestral music that, like Mahler and even Beethoven, you know, I do go back to the well when I have moments where I need some solace, or, or that, but also, yeah, I mentioned Billie Holiday, I mean, you know, the greats, for me, they’re they’re timeless, so for me, I guess I’m kind of more an old-fashioned listener, I don’t, in my, in my spare time, I’m listening to jazz, Western classical, and, and world music, Indian classical music, carnotic music.

 

Will Bachman  36:15

So, after that year in India, listening, classical continued to be a big piece for you.

 

Teresa Nakra  36:21

Absolutely, yes, yes. So, you’ll see a very diverse range of playlists that I have on Spotify, but my daughter, in particular, you know, helps introduce me to music of the 21st century, you know, popular music, and so I do enjoy listening to that as well. It’s just not something I go back to when I’m really, when I want that fix.

 

Will Bachman  36:49

Teresa, where can listeners find you online if they want to learn more about your teaching and your research and your publishing? Where would they find you?

 

Teresa Nakra  36:58

Thank you. Will perhaps the best way is my faculty website at Stevens Institute of Technology. You can Google me for Teresa Nakra, and you’ll find my information there. I’m also on LinkedIn, and would be delighted to hear from members of the class. Love to catch up with folks, and yeah, just really enjoying listening to your podcast work and hearing everyone’s stories. It’s

 

Will Bachman  37:27

very kind of you to say, Teresa. Thank you so much for joining today.

 

Teresa Nakra  37:30

It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you. Will

 

37:32

you.