A few days ago, I wrote a post about “1825” by NTO and about what I experienced while listening to it — the sensations, the images, the way that piece of music seemed to affect the way I was experiencing the world around me.

The next day, completely out of nowhere, I had an idea: why don’t I try an experiment? There was no theory behind it and nothing I was trying to prove. It was just one of those ideas that suddenly appears and makes me curious enough to follow it.

The idea was simple: take the exact same song and listen to it in different ways, in different situations, and see what happens. That was it. I had absolutely no idea what I was going to find, and I definitely didn’t expect it to become this interesting.

I started last night, at home. For the first experiment I sat on my bed and played 1825 through the speakers of my computer. I didn’t put headphones on because I wanted to see what happened when the music was simply there in the room with me.

I listened, sometimes with my eyes open and sometimes closing them for a while, waiting to see whether anything would appear in my imagination. But nothing really did. What I noticed instead was my body. The music wasn’t entering me in the same way it does through headphones; I could hear it around me, coming towards me from the computer, but there was still a physical distance between the sound and me.

And because there weren’t really images appearing in my head, my attention kept returning to physical sensations. I could feel the music more than I could see it. That became the first result, although at the time I wasn’t even sure whether there was much of a result at all.

Then I tried again, still in my bedroom, with exactly the same song. This time I lay down on the bed, closed my eyes, rested my hands on my stomach and chose a particular pair of headphones I have that allows me to increase the bass. I pushed the bass up, pressed play and stayed there without trying to imagine anything.

I had actually done something similar many years ago when I was DJing and choosing music for clubs: I used to lie down before going to sleep and listen to tracks to understand which ones could really transport me. Back then the circumstances were rather different. This time I was completely sober, lying in my own bed, curious to see what my brain would do. And apparently my brain decided to make a film.

At first, I could see the sky above me, framed by the tops of trees. Then a flock of birds appeared, something like swallows, all moving together through the sky as if they were performing a choreography. I watched them for a while, until gradually the image changed and only one swallow remained.

My attention stayed with her. She was flying, but there was something very particular about the way she flew: she didn’t seem to be fighting against the air or making an effort to hold herself up. The currents were carrying her. She seemed completely weightless, moving with the wind rather than against it, and there was an incredible sense of freedom in watching her.

Then the landscape changed. The trees disappeared and she moved towards the sea. I could see a beach and a rocky coastline, and it was as though I were standing somewhere on the shore watching this swallow fly away from me, parallel to the cliffs, further and further towards the sea.

After a while she came back, and suddenly we were above a seaside town that reminded me of Brighton. She flew between the rooftops, moving around the buildings almost as though she were exploring the city, still carried by the air, still dancing through it.

And while she flew, she grew. Her chest became larger, her wings became larger and even her expression seemed different, calmer and more confident. It was as if the act of flying itself was changing her. She wasn’t becoming confident and then flying; she seemed to become more confident because she was flying. The more she moved through the air, the bigger and more secure she became.

Then the perspective changed completely. Until that point I had been outside the scene, watching the swallow, but suddenly I wasn’t looking at her anymore. Somehow my point of view moved inside her and I was seeing through her eyes. I could see what she was seeing as she flew through the sky, and that was much more powerful than watching her from outside, because suddenly I wasn’t observing that feeling of freedom anymore. I was experiencing it.

For those moments it felt as though I were the one moving through the air, completely free, completely light, with nothing weighing me down. The sensation was enormous. Same bedroom, same person, same song. Only a different way of listening to it, and the experience had gone from physical sensations with almost no images to an entire visual world that eventually became something I could almost experience from inside.

I went to sleep, and this morning I woke up still fascinated by what had happened. I wanted to continue the experiment outside, so I went to the Thames. I found a bench, sat down facing the river and put in the small wireless earphones I normally use when I’m out.

The weather happened to be perfect for what came next: there was sunshine, but there were clouds too, so the light kept interacting with the surface of the water. For approximately the first three minutes of 1825, I kept my eyes open and simply watched.

The first thing that caught me was the river. The wind was moving the surface very slightly and the sunlight was catching all those tiny movements, so different points of the water kept lighting up and disappearing. The only way I can describe it is that the Thames looked as though it were made of sequins. Thousands of tiny flashes appearing, moving and vanishing as the water changed underneath them.

Then my eyes moved towards the trees along the river. I saw birds flying and letting themselves be carried by the wind, and then I started watching the tops of the trees. The leaves were all moving with the same air, and somehow, with the music in my ears, everything seemed to belong together.

And suddenly I had this overwhelming thought about the sheer majesty of what I was looking at. I imagined taking just one tiny square out of my entire field of vision, nothing special, just one little piece of what was in front of me, and I started thinking about how many things had to be happening at exactly the same time for that tiny square to exist as I was seeing it.

That leaf had to be there, attached to that tree, moving in that particular gust of wind. The tree had to be growing from that piece of earth. The river had to be moving. The sunlight had to reach the water at exactly that angle to create those tiny sequins. A bird had to cross that particular piece of sky at that particular second.

And that was only one tiny fragment of what I could see. How many millions, billions, trillions of things were happening simultaneously around me? For a moment I felt something I can only describe as the majesty of life, or maybe the majesty of the planet. I don’t actually know whether those were two different things.

Then 1825 reached the point at around three minutes where something in the music changes, and I closed my eyes. Immediately, the experience went somewhere else. The first thing I felt was a block in my chest. I can only describe it as something like a block of concrete: solid, heavy and pulsing. Pum. Pum. Pum. It had weight. I could feel its heaviness sitting there inside my chest.

Then, as the music continued, something started coming out of it. In my mind it looked almost like a beam of energy travelling upwards from the block, going higher and higher towards the sky, towards the sun. And the strange thing was that the more this energy travelled upwards, the lighter the block became.

It didn’t happen instantly. It continued for quite a while. The energy kept moving upwards and the block kept losing weight, little by little. And while that was happening, my perception of my own body started changing. I knew I was sitting upright on a bench beside the Thames. I hadn’t moved. But internally it began to feel as though my body were slowly changing position, as though I were becoming horizontal and starting to float.

The block became lighter and lighter until eventually there was no block anymore. And then there was just my body, weightless. I felt as though I were floating in the air with my arms open, with nothing underneath me, nothing holding me up and nothing pulling me down. Just this extraordinary lightness. And when I tried afterwards to find a word for what that final sensation actually felt like, there wasn’t one. The closest description was simply: Ahhhhh!

At that point I still had one more part of the experiment I wanted to try. I wanted something completely different from the river, somewhere dominated by people and movement, so I found a place where I could sit safely and watch a large, busy junction.

There were people constantly crossing in every direction, cars passing, buses moving through, traffic lights changing and two small trees on the pavement near where I was sitting. I put 1825 on again and this time kept my eyes open throughout the entire song.

During the first three minutes I looked at the whole junction rather than focusing on anyone in particular. There were so many people walking, so many cars moving, so many different things happening simultaneously, and with the music playing it looked almost like a giant choreography — except that nobody knew the choreography. Everything seemed out of time. People crossed at different speeds and in different directions, cars moved independently of them, buses appeared and disappeared, and nothing seemed to follow the rhythm of the music. It felt chaotic.

That was particularly strange because only a little earlier, beside the river, the birds and the movement of the leaves had seemed to fit the music almost effortlessly. So I looked at the two little trees beside the junction. Their leaves were moving in the wind and, once again, they seemed to move with 1825.

Then I noticed something else that fitted: the pedestrian traffic lights had a countdown. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Somehow that mechanical countdown seemed to fall into the music too. The leaves could find the rhythm. The machine could find the rhythm. But when I looked at humanity as a whole, all I could see was this huge, wonderfully uncoordinated chaos.

And then the music changed at around three minutes, and I started looking differently. Instead of watching the entire junction, I picked one person. Suddenly 1825 became their soundtrack.

I watched the way that person crossed the road, where they looked, the movement of their arms, the moments when they walked and the moments when they stopped, and somehow the music seemed to fit them perfectly. Then I chose somebody else, and it fitted them too. So I kept doing it.

There was a woman in a dress, a man in sports clothes with his own peculiar way of walking, another man in a T-shirt, someone with bleached blond hair, a woman with pink hair, an older woman crossing with a walking stick. Completely different people, different ages, different bodies, different clothes, different movements, presumably going to completely different places. And yet every time I isolated one person from the crowd, something happened. For those few seconds, 1825 seemed to belong to them. It was as though I had accidentally walked into their film and happened to be hearing the soundtrack to that particular moment of their life. Then I would move to another person and suddenly it was their soundtrack instead.

But every time I widened my gaze again and looked at everybody together, the soundtrack disappeared back into chaos. And that’s when another thought arrived. Maybe the chaos wasn’t the opposite of something beautiful. Maybe the chaos was partly created by uniqueness.

Of course all those people weren’t moving together. Every one of them was doing something different. One was rushing, another was wandering, another was looking around, another was concentrating on crossing the road, another was walking slowly with a stick. From far away they became a mass of apparently random movement, but the moment I looked at one person, the mass disappeared and there was an individual human being having their own tiny moment.

By then, the experiment had become something very different from the simple idea I’d had the night before. I had started with one incredibly basic question: what happens if I listen to exactly the same song in different ways?

I hadn’t thought about what the answer might be. I hadn’t thought about environment, timing, randomness or any of the things I was now thinking about. I had simply thought: same song, different ways of listening to it, let’s see what happens.

And look what happened. All of this took place between one evening and the following morning. My emotional state hadn’t dramatically changed. I was still me. 1825 was still exactly the same recording. Not one note had changed. And yet I had experienced the song through physical sensations, then through an almost cinematic visual world, then through this enormous feeling of the majesty of the natural world, then through weight and lightness inside my own body, and finally through the chaos and individuality of a busy London junction.

That’s when the experiment started becoming even more interesting to me, because it wasn’t simply about changing where I listened to a song. The exact moment itself seemed to matter. Even the Thames experience couldn’t really be repeated. I could go back to the same bench tomorrow, but the sun might not turn the water into sequins. The wind might not move those particular leaves. Those birds wouldn’t necessarily cross that piece of sky at that particular second.

I could return to exactly the same junction and sit in exactly the same place, but different people would cross the road, different cars would pass, somebody might run, somebody might stop, somebody might laugh, and the whole experience could become something else.

Even if I somehow recreated the external conditions as closely as possible, I wouldn’t arrive there as exactly the same version of myself, because I would already have experienced everything that happened during the previous listening.

And this is what has completely blown my mind about the whole thing. In less than twenty-four hours, the exact same piece of music created completely different experiences in the same person.

One was almost entirely physical. One became an amazing film inside my head. One had me staring at the Thames as if somebody had covered the entire river in sequins while thinking about the unimaginable number of things happening simultaneously in one tiny piece of the world. Then I closed my eyes and ended up floating weightlessly in the air. A little later, the same song turned a London junction first into complete human chaos and then, simply by changing where I put my attention, into dozens of tiny individual films, each stranger apparently walking through their own soundtrack.

And by this point, I couldn’t believe how fascinating this little experiment had become. I hadn’t expected anything even remotely like this when I started.

And that’s probably the part that excites me most: I don’t want the experiment to end here. When I started last night, I thought I was doing one little experiment with one song. I had no idea it would become this fascinating. Some of the experiences were physical, some contemplative, some incredibly visual, and some were so surreal that the only way I can describe them is almost LSD-like — except I was completely sober.

And now I’m ridiculously curious. If the exact same song can create all of this in the exact same person simply by changing the way, the place and the precise moment in which it is experienced, what else can happen?

So I’m going to continue. I want to play with this more, change things, try different situations, different conditions, maybe different songs, and see what happens when I move one element and leave another one alone. I want to see whether some things come back and whether completely new things appear.

Not because I’m trying to prove a theory. I’m not a scientist. This is the Artist Diary, not the Scientific Diary. I’m doing it for exactly the same reason I started in the first place: because I’m a curious person, and I really, really want to see what happens next.

God, I love this experiment!