What does Beethoven taste like?

Hi everyone!

Here's a video about the senses, and about a condition called synesthesia in which certain senses which are not normally connected are very much related: for example, some people see sounds or taste letters. Synesthesia is also a literary device whereby we associate different senses together, like when we speak about "the caress of your voice", for example.

So here's a little video briefly describing this condition. Some previous vocabulary and some questions:

Vocabulary:

the culprit
sensory (adj)
tangle up
shut down
to keep sth in check


Questions:

- Which senses are mentioned throughout the video?
- What is sequence synesthesia?
- What is a possible explanation for seeing A as red?
- What do we mean by the association of senses being durable? And memorable?
- Why was the host reticent to do an episode on this topic?


My ongoing battle with difficult verb patterns for Spanish speakers, like suggest, leads me to asking you to find the use of that verb at the end of the video and transcribe the full sentence. Ideas in the comment section! Thank you!

By the way, you can use closed captions for the key in this one. Enjoy!

Topic Video: Law

Hi everyone!

Here's a video on the origins of copyright law, and on the difference between what it was created for and what it is used for nowadays. The views of the author of the video are not necessarily my own, but he does raise a question. Who benefits from extending copyright to 70 years after the demise of the author? Heirs, companies?

I like the topic precisely because there doesn't seem to be a right or wrong answer to it, so the best way to argue in favour or against is by giving examples.

In any case, I'm using this video for you to find conditionals. The guy speaks fairly quickly, so turn on the captions for the difficult ones. All the conditionals I could catch are here.

The opposite of copyrighted material is public domain. A folk story, for example, is public domain. I wonder how it works with reworkings of that public domain story? For instance, The Little Mermaid. Could I make a film based on that? Or is it copyrighted since Disney made a version of it? I suppose if I go back to the source material, I could do it, but what if it looked "suspiciously similar" to the Disney story? I love to imagine those cases where definitions are slippery. What do you think?

Enjoy it!

Music and creativity

Hi everyone!

Just how prominent is music in your lives? Do you use it to dance, to accompany daily activities, to entertain yourselves while you shower? Or maybe you play music yourselves, or compose it? Do you ever think about how musical a language (such as English) can be ?

This video explains the pervasiveness of music in Ancient Greece. Would Plato be shocked at the kind of music you listen to?

The video is narrated at a very good rhythm to do structure hunts. Can you find:

1. any reduced relative clauses (omitting the pronoun and the verb "to be")?
2. any passive constructions?

Notice the very strong collocation with the verb accompany (and its word family). How many collocations with it can you find?


Remove the captions for the hunt, and then check. Let me know in the comments if you'd rather have a key, or if you want to compare your answers or correct them.

Enjoy!