A bit of a change of topic, but there’s plenty of maths, physics and chaos to be found in music! Ask me some day when you’ve got too much time on your hands… But I do thoroughly enjoy playing, writing, listening to and thinking about music. This page will hopefully evolve over time, and feature posts written about musical ideas, but for now serves as a kind of repository and listing of musical things I do.
Why have I put this on my website? Because I think it’s interesting, and maybe you do too. Because life is never totally divided into “work”, “hobbies” and “personal” silos. Because I want people to share the joy I find in music just as much as I want people to share my joy in science and teaching.
As a musician, I play a few instruments to varying degrees of proficiency; primarily piano, acoustic/electric/bass guitar, mandolin and singing, with others I play more sporadically. I similarly enjoy playing a variety of genres; classical piano/guitar, jazz, rock, blues, and their cousins. My favourite performances are ones where I get to engage with the audience, and don’t have to take myself too seriously (pro tip: If you make people laugh, they might not notice how bad you are at playing). Weddings are fun, restaurant gigs as well.
Recorded Music
The obvious place to start is with a bit of self-promotion. I have a slew of odd things on SoundCloud, largely piano music that grew out of improvisations, as well as some guitar stuff, an EP I recorded with a talented sound engineering friend, and an “album” I wrote and recorded as part of a ten-hour charity live stream. All of the pieces recorded here reflect different aspects of how I enjoy music, but few of them are polished pieces of work. They are, apart from the EP, simple concepts played how I felt like. I had fun playing them, and maybe someone else will have fun listening.
As a sample, here is the “album in a day”:
Written Music
For the 2024 Christmas Party of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, I wrote a 6-minute piece for piano, violin, flute, mandolin, erhu and bass ukulele. It was an extraordinary adventure, aided significantly by the great musicians who played it and provided feedback. I will put the (bare bones and poorly formatted) sheet music here, and if you want to hear a scratchy recording of the event ask me!
I have also written a couple of songs for church worship, and this is something I will keep doing. So if you happen to be involved in church worship and interested in writing songs, you are extremely welcome to reach out! I’d love to chat, share ideas, and so on.