One group of people that I sadly did not get to talk to when I was at the Science Online 09 conference last month was Miss Baker’s Biology Class. Stacy Baker’s interactive teaching methods were recently profiled in The Scientist, and she brought a few of her students to Science Online 09, where they were the life of the party. I missed their session, but everyone who did go there later mentioned that as their favourite session of the conference!
I have started doing research interviews with people who are somehow involved in both music and science. My first set of interviews was carried out at the Science Online 09 conference in North Carolina last month. I interviewed four people there, and only just got around to editing the interviews into little snippets. I don’t want to give away all my info, and am deliberately holding back the most interesting bits, but I do want to share some bits of the research interviews I recorded, and will be posting those as I go along.
The interviews are recorded with the Zoom H2, which looks like a cross between a 1930s jazz club microphone and something out of an old science fiction movie. I guess that’s a science/music connection in itself.
The first interview I’m going to put up is the one I did with Victor Henning of Mendeley. It is also the longest audio file I have. Everyone else I managed to shorten to one or two minute soundbites, but Victor’s stories were too long and interconnected to do that with, and I could not trim it down any further than 5 minutes.
Mendeley is a reference manager tool that can be used to store and organize academic papers. Interestingly, it is developed, run, and supported by people with a background in the music business. Listen what Victor has to say about his own past in the music industry, about the similarities between Mendeley and LastFM, and about the music connection of one of Mendeley’s new investors (Their funding deal was reported today in Tech Crunch).
(If the player doesn’t work, the file is also here)
Through a post on The Gulf Stream I found out that singer José González started his PhD in Biochemistry before switching to a full-time music career.
González does the music for this overall amazing Sony advertisement:
I found this interview about his previous work in science, and why he left the lab for music. Time was the main concern. When music became a full time job, he could no longer do science as well.
“I miss Biochemistry, but I still feel that there is a lot I can do with music” – José González
