Berkeley Voices explores the work and lives of fascinating UC Berkeley faculty, students, staff, and visiting scholars and artists. It aims to educate listeners about Berkeley’s advances in teaching and research, spark curiosity about the deeper layers of American history and to build community across our diverse campus. It's produced and hosted by Anne Brice in the Office of Communications and Public Affairs.
For the 2024-25 academic year on Berkeley Voices, we’re exploring the theme of transformation. In eight episodes, we’re exploring how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. New episodes come out on the last Monday of each month, from October through May.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Berkeley Voices explores the work and lives of fascinating UC Berkeley faculty, students, staff, and visiting scholars and artists. It aims to educate listeners about Berkeley’s advances in teaching and research, spark curiosity about the deeper layers of American history and to build community across our diverse campus. It's produced and hosted by Anne Brice in the Office of Communications and Public Affairs.
For the 2024-25 academic year on Berkeley Voices, we’re exploring the theme of transformation. In eight episodes, we’re exploring how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. New episodes come out on the last Monday of each month, from October through May.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In his research, UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate Saagar Asnani looks at music manuscripts from between the 12th and 14th centuries in medieval France. He says only recently have scholars begun to use a wider variety of media and artistic expressions as a way to study language. "If we unpack the genre of music, we will find a very precise record of how language was spoken," Saagar says.
To read medieval music, Saagar learned five languages — Latin, German, Italian, Catalan and Occitan — making 10 languages that he knows in total (for now, at least).
In losing the history of pieces of music, Saagar says, we’ve lost languages and cultures that were present and important to the time period.
And today, at a time when linguistic boundaries are crumbling before our eyes, he says, instead of judging someone who speaks differently from you, realize that “it's actually a way of speaking a language and that we should cherish that because it's beautiful in its own way."
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
UC Berkeley photo by Brandon Sánchez Mejia.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
