Question: how does your engineering choice stands out between geologist and musician?

Neil Bowles answered on 17 Mar 2014:

Well, I’m lucky in that I occasionally get to do all three :-).

I work with planetary geologists who help to interpret the measurements made by some of the space instruments that I have worked on, but I don’t have the training to call myself a geologist. I enjoy solving the problems that my geology colleagues bring me, so something like ‘If we could measure this type of rock on Mars from space, it would tell us about how water may have flowed on the surface billions of years ago – what do you reckon?’ Then we get out the pen/paper/whiteboard and start thinking of how we might build an instrument to do it.

I’m a pretty bad musician, mainly a mouse/laptop/keyboard type of person. Where I find the engineering bit of me steps in is in building new types of electronic instruments. In the ‘old days’ this meant building electronic circuits, these days it can mean electronics or building things in software. I have a student working on her final year project with me at the moment, and we are developing new types of sound processing code (in python actually, if you know about different programming languages) to build weird time distorting effects, like auto tuning someones voice or similar for demo purposes. The ideas behind these programmes actually came from the same sort of maths that drive the radio receiver in a mobile phone etc. Plus the effects are fun to develop and we’ve made some pretty strange, warped sounds on the project!