MCA - Ep#1 - Introduction

Marco Oros introduces himself as a podcaster from Slovakia and discusses his interests in music, languages, and various cultures. He mentions his love for ethnic music from different countries and also enjoys Western classical music. Marko is blind and uses screen reader software for his computer. He is fascinated by different languages, alphabets, and scripts, including Arabic, Chinese, Korean, and Greek. He can understand Czech due to its similarity to Slovak. Marko also collects musical instruments from around the world and plays the piano, ukulele, kalimba, jaw harp, and didgeridoo. He is interested in audio games designed for the blind. Marco concludes by thanking the listeners and looking forward to his next episode. Hi everyone, here is Marco Oros from Slovakia and this is my first podcast on audio.com. Due to this that English is my second language which can speak best, my limitations are in English maybe more bigger like in my native language Slovak. But this is due to this that it is just my first episode in English language. I remember to my first episodes in my podcast in Slovak language, in Tanuki Space podcast. Of course, it contains many mistakes, I don't want to say a lot about it. So about myself, my interests are music, languages, various cultures, countries of the world, various music from around the world, of course. So it means that I'm interested to the various ethnic music. Let me get some examples. Pygmy music from Cameroon or Central African Republic, throat singing from Mongolia or Tuva, and maybe to the Alpine Yodeling also. So there are various interesting traditions of the world. And also I love, for example, Indian classical music. But also I love our Western classical music. You know what it means, Western classical music or European classical music tradition. Of course, this tradition isn't popular just in Europe. But for example, in United States, maybe in Japan nowadays, in South Korea also. For example, United States, I think there is also some Icelandic music tradition. But let me tell you somewhere else. So no, not in this episode. About languages. I love various languages because, you know, every language has something very interesting. Not just this. I use various languages with my computer. I have a special software because I'm blind, the screen reader. Currently, I use NVDA, non-visual desktop access. And this software is very popular in the blind community. Also exists JAWS for Windows, but mostly I prefer NVDA. Next thing, about languages. So I use software like NVDA for this purpose, that it contains various languages from around the world. Of course, I can install another languages too. So there are also very interesting keyboard layout and various alphabets. Not just alphabets as alphabets developed from the Greek, but also various scripts. Let me give example. For example, Arabic script, Chinese script, Korean Hangul, what do I know? Maybe Indian Devanagari, Bengali letters, Ethiopian script. And there are various scripts and languages which are very interesting to me. Let me get one example. Greek language. I love Greek language, or Spanish, or Italian. About my native language, about my mother tongue, Slovak. Of course, this is my native language. No problem. Due to this, that I can speak Slovak, I can also understand and little bit speak Czech language. Because Czech and Slovak are mutual intelligible languages. Let's get another example. Serbo-Croatian languages. It means Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin. Those languages are so called Serbo-Croatian, because this is like one language. But due to this what happened, I don't want to explain a lot, because this discussion is not very good and I don't want to separate people, rather connect people is the best way. And those topics are not very good for discuss, also for me those topics are very interesting. So maybe later. But Arabic is also interesting language. But there is one problem. Yes, if you are from Arabic countries, there are a lot of Arabic varieties. And due to this, that there are a lot of varieties of Arabic languages, or Arab language. It is very difficult, which start to learn. Of course, there is this modern standard Arabic. But there is for example Egyptian Arabic, Algerian Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, Emirati Arabic, etc. Maybe I will talk about it later. Due to this, that I am very interested to the various musical traditions, I love to collect various musical instruments. Of course, on some of those musical instruments I can play. Let me get another example, but this is not just of collecting various musical instruments from around the world. Most of those instruments are like souvenirs. But nowadays I started to buy normal musical instruments. So I play on my musical keyboard. Let me tell you what is it, if you don't know. It is like synthesizer, but it is not synthesizer. Or I play on ukulele, my piano, I have played piano, I studied the piano. I also play kalimba, or thump piano. Maybe you have heard about this musical instrument. Jaw harp, didgeridoo, and various musical instruments from around the world. Of course, I am interested to the audio games. Those games are specifically designed for the blind people. Maybe I will talk about it later. So this is, I think, everything about myself. Thank you for listening, and I hope that it will be good to listen to my next episode. Goodbye from Slovakia by Marco Oroz.