There is a well-documented set of routes into expansive states of consciousness — psychedelics, unusual breathing practices, certain kinds of meditation. Nearly all of them work the same way: by loosening the brain’s ordinary structure. Music does the opposite. It imposes structure, insistently. Yet listeners describe deep musical experience in the same expansive terms. My work is about that apparent contradiction.
Two ideas set it up.
The first is entropy. Most people meet the term in physics, as a measure of disorder in a physical system. Information theory uses the same mathematics to ask a different question: how many independent things are going on at once in a signal, and how hard that signal is to compress or predict. Robin Carhart-Harris’s entropic brain hypothesis, introduced in 2014 and updated in 2026, applies that second sense to the brain. Within some functional range, the amount of complexity in ongoing brain activity tracks the felt breadth of experience. States of consciousness that feel expansive — psychedelic states, dreaming sleep, deep meditation — show high complexity. States with little or no experience in them, like anesthesia and deep sleep, show very little.
The second is entrainment: how the brain and body lock onto a repeating rhythm in the world around us. Tapping a foot to music without thinking about it is the visible edge of something happening throughout the nervous system. Neural resonance theory (Edward Large, 2025) holds that the brain contains rhythmic activity that can be drawn into stable timing relationships with an external rhythm. On this account, the pulse we feel in music is not only a prediction about what comes next, as earlier theories emphasized. It is a physical coupling of neural activity to external sound, such that the neural oscillation does not represent the rhythm — it is rhythm, actively creating the musical structures we perceive. That is why we can feel a silent downbeat in heavily syncopated music, and why music sometimes keeps going in the head after the sound stops.
The neural oscillation does not represent the rhythm — it is rhythm.
Put side by side, these two ideas seem to pull against each other. Entrainment is about structure: many parts of a system falling into shared timing. Entropy is many independent things going on at once.
Though it’s generally assumed that they are mutually exclusive states, my hypothesis is that, under certain conditions, steady locking in the brain’s slower rhythms supports and scaffolds complexity in its faster ones — much the way a jazz rhythm section grounds and enables the freedom of a soloist. I call this scaffolded entropy.
There’s more scientific foundation behind this than I will go into here, and the conjecture could turn out to be wrong. If it holds up in my research, it would be a contribution to perception and consciousness studies and would add to our understanding of how acoustic environments act on the nervous system.
This idea shapes how I compose. I treat the semi-anechoic room and its spatial array as a musical instrument in its own right, an extension of compositional technique rather than a venue for it. With layers of precisely interlocking rhythm, the ability to keep each layer distinct is essential to the effects I am after. Where a rhythm sits in the space around a listener changes how they hear the musical structure, not just where it appears to come from.