Radionics Radio - 'An Album of Musical Radionic Thought Frequencies' (Sub Rosa)

Radionics Radio's An Album of Musical Radionic Thought Frequencies is released this month on the wonderful Sub Rosa label, available either as a download, or as a CD (which is accompanied by a 20-page illustrated booklet detailing the history of radionics' relationship with acoustics).

During the course of the Radionics Radio project many people enquired "isn't radionics a quack medicine?"  The answer is not so simple.  Over the years there have been many radionics researchers and practitioners, all characterised by a sincerely held belief that our scientific understanding of reality isn't all it seems.   Overlooking the ins and outs of radionic philosophy, Radionics Radio focusses firmly on the mid-20th century technologies, particularly those of Oxford's Delawarr Laboratories who were dedicated to establishing a physical basis for radionics.  This is because one of the most fascinating electronic soundmaking devices ever produced emerged from this laboratory.

Delawarr Laboratories' experiments with electronic sound began in the late 1940s, culminating in 1962 with the emergence of the Delawarr Multi-Oscillator.  The purpose of the Multi-Oscillator was to provide its operator with a means to find combinations of audio frequencies that related to thoughts (in a process similar to dowsing).  To those unacquainted with radionics, this may seem odd, yet composers do that selfsame thing whenever they compose: a theme is held in the mind (e.g. "a horse") and the music is intuitively built up.

In practice, the clinical Multi-Oscillator produced very dissonant drones in odd tuning relationships.  The sounds weren't viewed as music by Delawarr Laboratories, although coincidentally, the soundmaking techniques paralleled developments in avant-garde music.

Radionics Radio was launched in 2014 as an application: a web-based reworking of the Multi-Oscillator.  Controversially, I believe it's the UK's first ever publicly-funded radionics 'device' (funded by the Arts Council in a roundabout way).  The app was a single oscillator that users could control whilst thinking of a thought, intuiting any moments where the frequency corresponded with the thought.  A list of intuited frequencies would be sent in alongside the thought or phrase, and I would re-constitute them as drones to be broadcast on Resonance 104.4FM.  Gradually, sets of different thought-frequencies were sequenced in time, or even merged if harmonies corresponded.  Ultimately, a system was developed where microtonal scales could be built-up from thought-frequencies.

As I'm not a radionics practitioner, the app's main purpose was to collect sonic material for my compositions.  These compositions (such as 'Peter send me money so I can fix the boat you promised') are microtonal due to the nature of the frequency selection (which either "occultly" embody the thought, or are merely arbitrary selections, depending on your viewpoint).  It is during the process of composing with the frequencies that a form of mental searching takes place (comparable to radionic technique) to musically capture the mood of the thought.  Initially, Resonance FM listeners sent in thought-frequencies, but over time, more and more radionics aficionados from around the world experimented with the Radionics Radio app, producing submissions that somehow seemed more "plausible" (e.g. frequencies spread out more evenly)

An Album of Musical Radionic Thought Frequencies is the culmination of compositional complexity.  It only contains a handful of submissions (out of over two-thousand) that I have musically-worked-out as pieces.  Initially, I treated all the thought-frequencies as immutable chords, but soon realised that octaves and sub-octaves could be created from those frequencies without interfering with the unique harmonic moods (or detracting from radionic philosophies, viz. remarks on sympathy between octaves in Matter in the Making [1966])

An example is shown here.  One of Delawarr Laboratories' original thought-frequency sets is "Resentment" (8Hz, 59Hz, 80Hz, 130Hz and 350Hz).   Although it's a microtonal run of frequencies, it can be broadly represented on a score:

Microtones cannot truly be reduced to standard musical notes, but a full scale of "Resentment" in all its octaves and sub-octaves would look something like this:

And so this is the basis of the Radionics Radio album, which marks the end of my Sound and Music sponsored composer residency at Resonance FM.  A massive thank you to everybody who helped with this intricate project, and to all users of the Radionics Radio application!

Resonance FM will be repeating early episodes of the Radionics Radio radio series starting on Thursday 11th August.