Today’s Lab Track comes to us from fan of the lab and frequent commenter Brandy Jefferys. The electronic-music duo Matmos is no stranger to science-tinged tracks — their debut album incorporated sound samples of crayfish nerve activity, and another included noises from a liposuction procedure — but this one may be the first to take a specifically skeptical theme (or perhaps the opposite of that).
The Marriage of True Minds is the culmination of a four-year parapsychological experiment, known as a ganzfield experiment, they performed on a group of volunteers. During a ganzfield experiment, a subject wears halved ping-pong balls over their eyes and headphones filled with static over their ears as someone else sits in the room with them and tries to telepathically communicate information. The subject is then supposed to describe the images that come into his or her head. During Matmos’s experiment, the band members tried to communicate what they wanted the album to be about, then recorded their subjects’ responses and incorporated them into the album’s various tracks, not only as sound clips, but also as overarching themes.
One popular vision these subjects experienced was triangles. The following is what resulted musically. Enjoy!
This has been another installment of Monday Lab Tracks. Send us your musical recommendations through our contact link at the top of the page, and tell us what you think of the song in the comments below!
