An excellent article!
To be honest, I don't understand how he came to be interested in linguistics. He DOES speak several languages - English and Spanish fluently, a year of Chinese Academy, and now Japanese (which he's been learning on his own for three or four years.) He regards music as a language too - and he's very strong musically. (Did you see the Willy Wonka video I posted? http://youtu.be/IXLRhsMNtQ4 It's not much of a video, but I'm grateful someone had it. He stole the show... and it was the director, not me, who first said that. )
Joey says he wouldn't be satisfied being a music major. That's surprising since music is a great deal of fun, but he says his thing is PATTERNS. He loves 'em. He ate up and spat out the Fibonacci sequence about five years ago, discovering some bizarre features it has when it's converted into other bases and the rightmost digit is then examined. (This is something nobody else has ever done, to the best of my knowledge.) He tried to talk about it with some of the Ivy League interviewers. One asked, "But what practical purpose is there to that?" Joey showed him its ties to the Mayan calendar which seems to incorporate some of the same rules. I'm sure the interviewer was lost....
So that's his thing. He loves music, math and linguistics. (Japanese, by the way, is NOT part of the linguistics program at UVA. So maybe foreign language should be considered a fourth interest....) But the connection seems to be PATTERNS - which I notice your article mentions.
Thanks.
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