 In a sense, my whole life has been in the field. I've moved around a lot from different countries to different cultures and I've had to learn how to adapt and listen and fit in, try and find ways of fitting in. So being in the field is just immersion. I'm in the music department, which is part of the School of Arts and I love the interdisciplinary nature of SOAS. I love the fact that as someone with a passionate interest in West African music that I can learn about all other aspects of culture in West Africa and connecting cultures from different parts of the world. As an ethnomusicologist or someone who's involved in music I really appreciate being able to use a practical or take a practical approach to the study and presentation of music through film and through recorded albums. Film and recording are better mediums to do that than through the written word. You reach many more people that also the people that you are representing in your work are able to access your work in a way that they probably wouldn't be able to if you were just writing about them from the research point of view. It's absolutely vital to engage with the people that you're researching. How can we best exchange knowledge? It is absolutely vital to have an artistic response from the people that we are researching, from the cultures that we are researching because when we do research and when we publish our research we are producing knowledge. How can you do that ethically and with integrity without involving the artists or the people that you are writing about or presenting? In the process of researching about musical childhood, if you like I came across this wonderful tradition that is unfortunately disappearing which is hand clapping songs which happens primarily in villages in rural Mali and elsewhere in Senegal and Guinea as well. When I began researching this I realised that no one had written about it not even Malians, not great scholars who were working on this music. It's a seminal tradition that feeds into popular music and that explains many things about society because it's the way that little girls comment on society on gender norms and what they think is going to be expected of them when they get married and be mothers and so on. I honestly don't think I could have indulged my love for music from West Africa and also from Cuba anywhere else with the kind of support that I've had from SOAS and the recognition that these are great musical traditions that actually need to be studied alongside popular music western popular music and alongside western classical music so it's just that kind of deep level of understanding of the richness of world cultures that exist at SOAS that's the heart of SOAS.