In the same year, Mesmerism, a Diamond Jubilee commission for the Liverpool Mozart Orchestra with pianist Alexandra Dariescu, won a British Composer Award.

Howard's work increasingly blurred the boundaries between art and science, although, as Simon Rattle once remarked 'her music doesn't feel the least bit mechanical – she has her own very particular sound world'.

Howard collaborated with mathematician Marcus du Sautoy to create string quartet Four Musical Proofs and a Conjecture, which was premiered at the New Scientist Live Festival in 2017.

Howard's first full-length opera, To See The Invisible (2018), was an Aldeburgh Festival commission with a text by Selma Dimitrijevic after a short sci-fi story by Robert Silverberg.

The Telegraph remarked that the opera demonstrated that 'Howard's idiom has a cool confidence and clarity of its own'[3] while the Times observed that the achievement 'raised hopes for Howard's future work'.

The overlap between music, maths and computer science is reflected in some of the titles, for example Calculus of the Nervous System (2011) and the 2013 children's work Pi (a Pie?).

Word-setting and word play are equally important features in Howard's oeuvre, such as the recent use of Ada Lovelace's text in the ‘But then, what are these numbers?’ (2019).