Many moons ago, I picked up a South American folk instrument called a charango. Based on the sounds of this I started up a little troupe called Karmadillo. That is still the space where I do my normal music.

One day, whilst working in the laboratory at the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, I felt deep pangs of anguish that the work horse of much plant experimentation, Arabidopsis thaliana, did not receive public commendations for it’s noble work, and felt that this was a metaphor for the work of scientists in the public eye. I wrote a song about it. 

A song about Mendel followed. A gate had been opened, and a whole albums worth of music rushed out. The working title of this musical project was ‘Professor Karmadillo’, and the album – released on the 29th of February – was entitled ‘Giant Leaps’, available here.

Parenthood and work then meant pushing creative projects to the background, and I had a move from the world of acoustics and Digital Signal Processing into field of bioinformatics. Starting at the University of Cambridge Department of Plant Sciences I then ventured to the Wellcome Genome Campus and the Ensembl Genome Browser project.

It had been a while since I’d done anything concrete, but a grant from the Wellcome Trust Public Engagement team was offered which raised my energy levels and an idea that I’d had in the back of my mind popped started its journey into reality. I hope you decide to follow me on this journey – I expect to land my musical rocket ship into a space port any day soon – with a cargo of a Genomics themed musical!