Melodic Minds Podcast

What if you made music live — on stage, in front of an audience — entirely by writing code? Alex McLean (research fellow, Sheffield; co-founder of Tidal Cycles and Strudel live coding environments; co-curator of Algorave and Alpaca Festival) joins the podcast to explore algorithmic music, live coding performance, and a worldview where everyone is already a technologist. We discuss South Indian Car...

How do you compose music that leaves room for the performers to bring themselves to it — and still sounds exactly right? Professor Jane Stanley (Professor of Composition, University of Glasgow; founding member of the Young Academy of Scotland) joins the podcast to talk about her music composition process — from fully-notated works to semi-improvised, indeterminate pieces tailored for specific perf...

What if you could hear a molecule? Or encode the altitude profile of a Scottish hillside into a guitar line? Professor Colin Campbell — chemist, musician, and University of Edinburgh chair of medical and biological spectroscopy — has done both. In this episode, Colin charts his journey from a Fulbright sabbatical in Boulder, Colorado (where he spent months turning protein sequences into listenable...

What does a conductor actually do — and what can their extraordinary blend of intellect, intuition, and management teach the rest of us? Dr. Hannah Baxter, conducting academic and founder of Notes from the Podium journal, pulls back the curtain on one of music's most misunderstood roles. From three years of score preparation to the split second a conductor walks onto the podium (and the orches...

What can jazz improvisation teach us about leading a team, navigating failure, and staying true to yourself? Dr. Mark Holub — drummer, composer, band leader, and Mercury Music Prize-nominated leader of Leadbib (now with eight albums) — joins Lynn and Beth for a wide-ranging conversation about group language in jazz, the art of knowing when NOT to play, and what it really means to lead without perf...

What does it really mean to work across disciplines — and what happens when you put people with dementia in the driving seat of technology design? Dr. Jennifer McRitchie (UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, University of Sheffield) joins Lynn and Beth to explore musical technologies for dementia, participatory research, and cognitive science. Jennifer's work bridges electrical engineering, music psych...