Entrain is a new musical language for layered rhythmic environments in three-dimensional space.
Each work is a singular installation whose real medium is the listener’s own perception.
Entrain cannot be reproduced on headphones or home speakers.
A semi-anechoic room. Twenty-two speakers. Thirty minutes. One listener.
The brain runs on rhythm and resonance.
Beneath every moment of awareness, your brain is rhythmically coupled to the world around you, and to the life inside you — this is called neural entrainment.
These are the layered rhythms that shape your sense of time and self.
This music reaches them, by design.
Entrain is a musical practice grounded in neural resonance theory, a framework built over three decades of research in music neuroscience. It holds that musical structure exists not only in the sound but as physical, embodied dynamics in the listener’s brain.
Our brains don’t represent music abstractly — they become it.
The experience is simple: you enter a semi-anechoic room with a finely tuned spatial speaker array, sit back, and close your eyes. No technique is required — your role is to let the music find you.
A single sitting is complete in itself. But those who return tend to find that the experience evolves — not because the sound changes, but because they do.
Neuroscience has made great progress in measuring and modeling entrainment, but its fundamental power to shift consciousness remains unexplained.
I’m fusing spatial composition, ethnomusicology, and neuroscience into a new category of perceptual and musical experience.
The listener’s perception becomes part of the composition.
These aren’t songs or symphonies. They’re not ambient wellness or focus playlists. Each musical environment has its own spatial geometry. Its interlocking structure is designed to engage the nervous system’s capacity for entrainment across multiple timescales. The sound surrounds the listener in three dimensions — arriving from above, below, and around them.
It’s like listening from inside the music. The sound is like a sculpture in motion around the listener — shifting layers of rhythm and resonance that keep producing detail. Being enveloped by sound, and by its subtle motion through space, engages the brain, the body, and the sense of self in ways that headphones or home speakers cannot replicate.
Entrain exists only as an in-person sound installation for individuals and very small groups.
The brain is an intrinsically rhythmic organ. Across many frequency bands, its electrical activity oscillates continuously, and these rhythms shape perception, attention, and the sense of time passing. Heartbeat and breath are rhythmic too; the brain tracks them, and from that tracking comes the ongoing sense of being a body in the world.
When sound carries a strong temporal structure, these rhythms begin to synchronize with it — a phenomenon called neural entrainment. It is measurable, documented across decades of research, and familiar: it is what makes a foot tap to a beat. Entrain compositions are built to engage it well beyond the motor system — across the interlocking rhythms that govern perception, attention, and autonomic state.
I compose from neural resonance theory: the account of how neural oscillations lock to external rhythm through nonlinear resonance, forming the stable patterns the brain experiences as musical structure, anticipation, and shifts in awareness.
Composers have used recordings of brain activity as a musical instrument since Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer in 1965. For Entrain, listeners may wear an EEG headband to record brainwave activity. The measurements are part of my compositional research: they show how closely the brain’s rhythms track the musical structures. The EEG is not required and nothing about a sitting depends on it.
The foundational science is well established. What remains an active area of research is how these mechanisms interact with consciousness, emotion, and individual difference. People report a range of experiences, depending on how their own perceptual dynamics meet the sound.
Entrain extends a long compositional lineage. From the intricate polyphony of medieval organum, through Arvo Pärt’s tintinnabuli and Steve Reich’s phase processes, composers have built music whose purpose is not entertainment but the shaping of a listener’s perception and state of consciousness, often in sacred contexts. With La Monte Young’s sustained drone environments and Pauline Oliveros’s practice of deep listening, that purpose moved off the concert stage and into inhabited time and space — sonic environments to be entered and dwelt within, listening as a practice rather than an event. This is the form Entrain takes.
Similar moves were happening in the visual arts. Working in those same decades, James Turrell and Donald Judd made light and space into work whose real subject was the perception of the person standing inside it. Entrain belongs to that lineage as much as to the musical one — working in sound and time rather than light and space.
I work with sound, time, and the listening body to extend the vocabulary of perception.
At age four, I was obsessed with finding resonant intervals on my mother’s piano. I began composing at age six and that impulse — to shape time with sound — has guided everything since, through multiple paths that have asked the same question: what does sound do to consciousness?
I studied ethnomusicology at the University of Washington, with graduate research on the anthropology of time, psychoacoustics, and cognitive psychology. After that, fieldwork in North Africa, studying how different cultures organize temporal and sensory experience through music and ritual.
As Director of Sound Design at Microsoft for more than a decade, I created the sounds heard on more than a billion devices every day — I have been called the most heard composer you’ve never heard of. I also founded the Sound & Sensory Design Program and collaborated with Microsoft Research on spatial audio for immersive computing.
Now, through Entrain, I’m returning to my foundational questions with a theoretical framework and a production capability that didn’t exist before.
The research and framework I’m developing, which shape my composition practice and grow from it.
Entrain is an evolving practice, shared with individuals and very small groups, by invitation. If you’d like to be in occasional correspondence as it develops, you’re welcome to write.
Entrain works with the nervous system’s own capacity to synchronize with sound. Caution is advised for anyone with active psychotic conditions, uncontrolled seizure disorders, or recent severe trauma without support.