Do you recognise this tune? Alright, how about this one?

They may be familiar but perhaps don't sound quite right.

That's because they're part of an experimental album called Tuplets for toddlers, which has taken familiar nursery rhymes,

but played around with the underlying numbers, the counts, the rhythms, the tempos. It's a fascinating collaboration between a number of talented composers, but we'll get more into that soon.

But first, let's go back a few steps and to today's very special guest, Alan Stewart.

Now Alan's an important man in my life because he composes

and performs much of the music you'll hear across all my videos and podcasts, not just number

file. To me, he's some kind of genius. I actually call him the maestro, a nickname I'm not entirely

sure he likes, but he's way too polite to stop me. Like me, Alan lives in the

UK, but he's not a full-time musician. In fact, he's a school teacher. And that's where our

discussion begins. Did you always want to be a physics teacher?

Was that what you wanted to be when you grew up?

No, I don't think I knew what I wanted to be at all when I was at school.

I kind of drifted into physics because I found it quite easy, I suppose, and I don't want to sound big-headed like that, but I just found it came naturally to me.

Maths, on the other hand, did not come easily to me, and I really struggled with A-level maths when I was at college myself.

But, no, physics, I always found, like, it just made a lot of sense to me.

And so when it came time to choose what I wanted to study at

university, physics just seemed like a very natural choice. Did you want to be a physics teacher?

Or did you want to like, you know, be making discoveries and working at the Large Hadron Collider

and figuring out how black holes work? So during my degree, I think there was a lot of pressure

for us to decide upon our

career. And I was still very, very uncertain about what I wanted to do until I got to third year.

...