Radionics Radio at the Science Gallery: Thought Diffusion Experiments

This coming Tuesday - 7th October - there will take place a diffusion of 'thought frequencies' at the Science Gallery Pop-Up in Boland House, London Bridge.  It forms part of the Radionics Radio project, which is an extension of the groundbreaking acoustic radionic experiments conducted by George and Marjorie de la Warr at their Delawarr Laboratories beginning in the late 1940s.

Radionics is a fringe science that, through Delawarr Laboratories, led to the first long-durational electronic sound experiments of the 20th century.  Delawarr was particularly concerned with the way electronic tones interact acoustically in the air - at the first International Congress of Radionics in London, May 1950, George de la Warr demonstrated interference patterns produced by multiple loudspeakers, each respectively playing single tones that radionically related to the body (for instance, the larynx mucous membrane: 133Hz, 264Hz and 455Hz).  The lively interaction of these frequencies in the air (as opposed to being mixed together into a single loudspeaker) was said to contribute to the 'acoustic therapy' process.

The classic Delawarr finger-stick rubber detector pad

Delawarr's acoustic frequency diffusion set-up c.1947

The clusters of frequencies were originally identified by concentrating on a thought whilst turning an electronic oscillator and rubbing a 'detector pad'.   Whenever the finger encountered a 'stick' - or some friction - on the pad, the frequency was noted down.  In this way, frequency combinations relating to thoughts were obtained.

Delawarr Laboratories never regarded their radionic research as music, but one of the first people to discern the correspondences between radionics and sound art was the electronic composer Daphne Oram.  Oram had an interest in Delawarr's sonic experiments, but her research in this direction remains unpublished.  However, there is a radionics undercurrent in her 1972 book An Individual Note of Music..., where she muses that objects and concepts possess wavepatterns that, through perception, intermodulate with our own individualised mental wavepatterns (hence the 'individual note' of the title).

"In every human being there will surely be tremendous chords of wavepatterns 'sounding out their notes'"  Daphne Oram, An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics, 1972.

Anybody remotely interested in electronic music and its origins will find interest in these experiments, and the Radionics Radio irradiations at the Science Gallery are quite noteworthy in that such experiments have never been trialled before on this magnitude.   The audience will be privy to combinations of 'thought frequencies' harvested from the Radionics Radio web application (the latest version v2, enhanced by Jonny Stutters, offers more accuracy and wider compatibility).  The irradiations will also be broadcast on Resonance 104.4FM at a later date.  Delawarr applied for a radio broadcasting license in the late 1960s to similarly broadcast audio radionic tones, but were refused permission by the GPO who stated "we are unable to agree to the use of radio in the way you propose."  Only now is this vision becoming reality with the help of Sound and Music.

Please visit www.radionicsradio.co.uk to convert your thoughts into frequencies.

Additional thanks to Jonny Stutters, Dr. Ed Baxter, Peter Lanceley for assistance with the diffusion experiments, and John Dignan for the generous donation of audio equipment.

Radionics Radio Application v.1 Goes Live!

A radionic broadcasting instrument at the Science Museum

A small but distinguished audience bore witness to the first ever presentation of the fringe science of radionics at the Science Museum last Friday.  Radionics has long since been at odds with established science, so the convergence is quite significant.  Admittedly, it was unofficially sanctioned: the exhibiting of the Delawarr radionic broadcasting instrument was carried out under the umbrella of Resonance FM, temporarily installed in Aleks Kolkowski's Exponential Horn room at the museum.  The presentation formed part of my Radionics Radio launch show (featuring fringe-science expert Mark O. Pilkington) - an exciting new experimental project that pushes electronic sound to/beyond its limits!  More on that in a moment...  But you may be wondering: what is radionics?

In America, radionics is often termed psionics - the psi prefix emphasising the psychical aspect.  Radionics began as a method of diagnosing and treating illnesses, but gradually expanded its application to agriculture, mineralogy, finding faults in cars (as described in Bruce Copen's Radiesthesia for Home and Garden), making wishes, and finding lost aeroplanes, and is now bewilderingly wide-ranging in its scope.

General radionic theory posits that it is possible to embody a thought or concept as a run of numbers or frequencies.  The most important component in a piece of radionic equipment is the user.  The user thinks of a thought, rubs his/her finger on a detector pad - a smooth or slightly rubberised surface - and at the same time turns a control until a 'stick' or some friction is intuited by the user.  This indicates the control's position now corresponds to the thought, and the other controls are positioned in the same way.

Radionics is characterised by the use of elaborate electronically-styled equipment, resembling radios, or even analogue synthesisers.  The idea that a thought carries with it its own waveform was central to the groundbreaking research of Delawarr Laboratories in Oxford.  They sought a physical basis for radionics, and in the process, built many powered radionics devices that actually did produce electronic waveforms in a similar manner to synthesisers of the time.  The author Duncan Laurie, in The Secret Art, recognised how Delawarr had preempted experimental music: he concludes, "without realising it and with little or no subsequent credit, the De La Warrs had initiated and explored an important venue for artistic discovery".

The Delawarr Multi-Oscillator (with 'detector pad')

In the classic book detailing Delawarr experiments, Matter in the Making (1966), Langston Day and George De La Warr write:
"It appears that thought is a complex vibration in some respect akin to known forms of radiation. (...) With sufficiently delicate instruments it should be possible to analyse a thought, and this in fact is the case. (...) Suppose a thought is held in mind, such as the general concept of some particular disease.  If the frequency dial of an oscillator is slowly turned, a stick will be occur on the detector pad at a series of different frequencies.  When these are listed they are known as a 'frequency run'."

In the mid-1960s, Delawarr planned to broadcast specially devised therapeutic audio frequency clusters into people's homes via a radio broadcast transmitter, but the GPO didn't grant the laboratories a license, and the project was never realised.  But now, in conjunction with Resonance FM and Sound and Music, a homage to these experiments is underway.

Anybody can now attempt to convert their thoughts into frequencies using a specially developed web application: Radionics Radio.  Any conceivable thought can be converted to a 'frequency run', from "green grass" to "light birds hooting in the trees, what will the day bring?" (incidentally, these two thoughts were merged and broadcast at the Science Museum on Friday).  Submitted 'frequency runs' will then be reconstituted into tone clusters and broadcast on Resonance FM. [Thanks to users 'Asterism' and 'Radiomind' for those two thought-frequency submissions!]

Users of Radionics Radio should bear in mind that some patience, concentration and perseverance is needed.  The web application is modelled closely along 'medical' lines in keeping with the original Delawarr instruments.  A help video can be seen on Youtube:



The whys and wherefores of radionics are outside the scope of this blog post, suffice to say that in order to get any results from it whatsoever, it is necessary to tautly suspend your disbelief!  To anybody interested in sound and electronic / experimental music, Delawarr Laboratories' medical / intuitive experiments with soundwaves (starting in the late 1940s) form a fascinating parallel universe of electronic sonics.  Some more information can be found on the Sound and Music blog - which is highly recommended for newcomers to radionics.  More to come....

Radionics Radio can be accessed at www.radionicsradio.co.uk.  Special thanks to Sound and Music, Diana Di Pinto, Mark Pilkington, Chris Weaver and Ed Baxter.

A Robotic, Artificial Intelligence 'Local Poet'

On Friday I was a guest on William English's Wavelengh on Resonance FM (currently in residence in Aleks Kolkowski's Exponential Horn installation at the Science Museum).  It was a broadly book-based theme, and we both brought with us various books and ephemera.  W. English, being an established book-dealer, presented some absolute gems as predicted.  I'd anticipated that my own selections would be lacklustre in comparison, so I attempted to dig out some 'exclusives' for him.   (The 'exclusives' may not be particularly satisfying, but they're as-yet-unheard exclusives nonetheless!).

In 1996, a cache of poetry pamphlets by a local poet named Bill Cooper were discarded by a bookshop where my dad worked.  The title of the publication was The People's Poet.  Unhappily, it appeared that The People were not so interested in The People's Poet, and all copies were thrown out - however, I rescued a few.  Bill Cooper, through his poetry, appears a down-to-earth romantic who likes chicken, sparking Russett cider, roast pork, prawns, beef, beer, darts, Kirsty Macoll and moments of tenderness.  His publication started me off collecting what I used to call "crap poetry" - but now the term "rustic poetry" seems more respectful.

Some other examples of ultra-middle-of-the-road poetry.

Here are two examples of Bill Cooper's poetry:

Barbed Wire Dreams

I've been dreaming
Barbed Wire Dreams
That cut and shock inside.

I've not been sleeping too well
Recently.

Irish Coffee

If feels so cold
And damp and chilly
I wish I could be
An Irish Coffee.

Bill Cooper, in his obscurity, represents an archetype of rustic local poetry.  His ultra-middle-of-the-road style was so rustic, in fact, that it appeared to me that it could be easily replicated by statistically analysing the text and generating new "robot Cooper" poems using a computer running a Markov chain, that is, a system of probabilistic text analysis.  In practice, however, it was quite difficult.  A few years ago, I typed out the entire text into a special computer program I had built for this purpose (using the data processing parts of MaxMSP), creating a tweakable Markov chain - the foundations of 'artificial intelligence'.  This program would be a 'robot local poet' modelled on Bill Cooper, and it was hoped that the poetry generated would retain the distinctive deliciously bland style of Cooper himself.

The results were generally too abstract to pass as true 'Cooperisms'.  However, certain iterations of text generation spawned some rustic profundities that seemed passable as Bill Cooper musings.   I added punctuation, inflection, and fed the results into a speech synthesiser.  The results were played on Wavelength, and can now also be heard below:

The Philosophy of Mediadropping podcasted, and the history of "planking"

'The Philosophy of Mediadropping' show mentioned in the previous posting is now available online as a podcast here.

Mediadropping is the random public dropping of home-made media which is peculiar in some way, with the intention of eliciting a reaction from whoever finds and plays the media.

I have often wondered if an old mediadropping was responsible for the phenomenon of "planking": where photos are taken of people lying down in unusual places and circumstances.  In March 2005 I had compiled a CD-R mediadropping extravaganza, bearing various mp3s, images and random text files of quantum physics and variations on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.  Its intention was to flummox.  One directory, titled "The Fallen" contained a dozen photos of persons lying unexplainably prone.

One of these images, for example, taken around February 2005, featured Resonance FM's Richard Thomas on the floor of 9 Denmark Street (the old station offices) clutching a drumstick, seemingly staking his claim as a pioneer of this art.  A rare and remarkable thing, this was seen as a radical nugget to be experimentalised as mediadropping fodder.  It should be noted this was before the UK "planking" craze of 2009 - after which time it was picked up by the tabloids and divested of its mystique, and, as such, would from there onwards be seen as being perhaps a bit infra dig (as least, to those already acquainted with the practice before it 'sold out').  Today's "planking" bandwagon-chasers mostly appear to be people mucking about, often dangerously.  But these pre-craze 2005 mediadropping photos exude a profound honesty, a "professional strangeness" - an artistic integrity, if I may be so pretentious - which modern day attempts entirely fail to capture.

I can provide evidence of perhaps the earliest instance of "planking" (or, "the lying down game" as it's also known).  I am certain that "planking" can be linked to a general mediadropping tradition... In 1995 I made several photographs showing the "lying down" phenomena - some school friends I persuaded to down their clipboards during a school trip.  Duplicates of these were made to accompany mediadropped cassettes from 1995-96.  This was before Radiohead's video for 'Just' (showcasing epic "profound lying down"), and also predates the alleged invention of the "game" in 1997.  Of course, it completely precedes Robert J. Sawyer's 1999 novel 'Flashforward' (curiously, also encompassing quantum physics in relation to "profound lying down"), the US TV adaption of the same name, and 'This Morning' hosts Phillip Schofield and Jenni Falconer popularising the "lying down" and trashing it up still further earlier this July.

The Philosophy of Mediadropping - ResonanceFM, 17th June, 4pm

As part of Resonance 104.4FM's broadcasts from Raven Row, a show I produced, voiced by Will Luscombe (of the exquisite Luscombe's Choice), will be aired on Friday 17th June, entitled 'The Philosophy of Mediadropping'.

'The Philosophy of Mediadropping' is a relentless musing on the practice of mediadropping - the dropping of home-made CDs, DVDs, tapes, books, manuscripts, etc. in public places for random people to find.

Mediadropping is a pathological habit of mine.  My old Resonance show, 'The Exciting Hellebore Shew', documented many mediadroppings in detail (or tapedroppings as I referred to them back then, as cassette was the weapon of choice).  Special 'music' was consigned to cassette or CD-R and scattered hither and thither.  Over time, an instrumentarium was built up specifically geared toward sonically shocking unsuspecting mediadropping recipients.

Mediadropping may be seen as a physical analogue of the 'crapflooding' and 'trolling' phenomena of the internet age, but this is a debatable comparison to be treated in a later posting here.  In the meantime, tune in to catch 'The Philosophy of Mediadropping' and hear Luscombe's voice fed through a sawn-off trolley and a garage door.  Feel the cassette-grot erode your tolerance threshold.