Culture
The "Scientists" Who Want To Turn Your Thoughts Into Sound
Radionics Radio is applying medical pseudo-science to make electronic music.
Can thoughts be the actual material of sound? This may seem like a bit of a far-out question, but in the bizarre world of radionics this is the intuition upon which scientific research is built.
Radionics emerged a fringe science in the 1800s based on the principle that all living things have defined vibrational frequencies. In 1962 the Delawarr Multi-Oscillator was built—a strange, modular synth-like looking instrument designed to find combinations of audio frequencies that related to thoughts.
London-based musician, writer and instrument-builder Daniel Wilson has taken the principles of the multi-oscillator to create some of the wackiest and boundary-pushing electronic music in recent memory. He first built an app-version of the Mulit-Oscillator, which allowed people to experiment with sound construction from thoughts. He gathered this sonic thought material for his Radionic Radio show on Resonance FM and then morphed the sounds into an album of avant-garde electronics that sound like a haunting world of a thousand different ideas collapsed into music
FACT has a fascinating piece exploring the strange world of radionic music making with Wilson here. You can listen to a clip of the album and a watch a short documentary on radionics compiled by Wilson below.
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Read more: How brainwaves can become music
