12/2025 - ongoing

Quantum Sound at Fabric
The first neuroscience study inside world-renowned nightclub Fabric London

Photography by Stefan Hanegraaf

Team

Research
Oliver Durcan, Dr Peter Holland, Prof. Guido Orgs, Miles Comer, Oran Gottlieb, Jolie De Waal, Albane Arthuis, Anna Stewart, Francesca Mamino, Anna Mankowska, Safiyyah Nawaz

Operational and Technical
Bianca Mayhew, Oliver Durcan, Dr Peter Holland, Luke Laws, Mike Becker

Partners
Goldsmiths University of London, Mastery, London Warehouse Events (LWE), Fabric London

Press
Inverted Audio | February 2026
Music Radar | February 2026

Background
Quantum Sound is an event series from Mastery. The first neuroscience study to take place inside Fabric, the world-renowned London nightclub, was conducted at the launch of its album, Mastery: Quantum Sound - eleven tracks of ambient music on Houndstooth Records, featuring Djrum, Wata Igarashi and Alessandro Cortini, among others. The study forms part of an ongoing research programme investigating sound-induced altered states of consciousness, in collaboration with Mastery.

Deep listening can shift conscious experience. People describe merging with, dissolving into, or losing themselves in the music - the kinds of altered states this programme sets out to understand. Such experiences echo those mapped in psychedelic and flow research, where the sense of self softens and gives way to a feeling of unity with the surrounding world. This study explored whether moments like these leave a measurable signature in the listener's brain, and how that signature relates to the music driving the experience.

Methods
Fifteen people listened to the full 71-minute album twice, in very different settings: once at the launch event in Fabric's Room 1, lying on the club's Bodykinetic dancefloor - which sends sub-bass frequencies up through the body - alongside the room's quadrophonic sound system; and once through in-ear headphones in the EEG lab at Goldsmiths, University of London.

In both sessions each listener wore a 32-channel EEG cap, which records the brain's electrical activity, and lay still with an eye mask on. Afterwards, they marked how the experience shifted across the album, giving a felt record to set alongside the brain recording. We then analysed the brain data using a method called microstate analysis.

We have built an early, interactive preview of that analysis, shown below. It focuses on Bliss Code 000, the album's opening track and the piece we analysed in this first pass. Bliss Code 000 is a unique collaboration of practices, where ancient sound-therapy instrumentation meets electronic sound design and modular synthesis.

Each line in the player represents one of several recurring patterns of whole-brain activity, momentary configurations the brain moves between many times a second; the higher a line sits, the more that pattern is present at that point in the music. Press play to watch the lines move against the music, and switch on the topographic simulation, built from the real recordings to show what the brain activity actually looked like across the scalp.

What we found
This is a first pass through a rich dataset, so what follows is preliminary and subject to further checks. Two relationships stood out. The first centres on a single recurring pattern, labelled Microstate E in the player above and shown there in blue. Its presence over time rose and fell in step with the orange line, which records how strongly listeners reported feeling they were part of the musical features. Of all the patterns measured, Microstate E was the only one to correlate with this feeling.

The second relationship is one you can explore for yourself. As Bliss Code 000 plays, watch the blue Microstate E line: it tends to climb as new sounds and layers enter and grow, and to ease as the musical features clear. Look at the moments where it peaks, dips, rises and falls, and listen for what the music is doing there - see whether you can hear the connection. On our side, more analysis is needed to pin down exactly what in the music is shifting at these points, beyond how it is perceived; that is where the work goes next.

These observations are intriguing because of what Microstate E has been associated with elsewhere. In other research it has been linked to the brain's salience network - the system that picks out whatever matters most in a given moment, integrating signals from the outside world with sensations from inside the body. That offers a natural reading of both relationships: a brain state responding to new musical information arriving, and to the feeling of being drawn into it.

A full technical manuscript, with the complete analysis and statistics, will be written up and shared with the research community at a later date.

To follow the project as it develops, sign up for updates using the form on this page. For specific questions, you are welcome to contact the project manager, Oliver Durcan, using the contact details at the foot of the site.

Further reading
Custo, A., Van De Ville, D., Wells, W. M., Tomescu, M. I., Brunet, D., & Michel, C. M. (2017). Electroencephalographic resting-state networks: source localization of microstates. Brain connectivity, 7(10), 671-682.

Tarailis, P., Koenig, T., Michel, C. M., & Griškova-Bulanova, I. (2024). The functional aspects of resting EEG microstates: a systematic review. Brain topography, 37(2), 181-217.

Yaden, D. B., Haidt, J., Hood Jr, R. W., Vago, D. R., & Newberg, A. B. (2017). The varieties of self-transcendent experience. Review of general psychology, 21(2), 143-160.

Film by Callum Pearson

Scientific research on creatives and creativity

Scientific research on creatives and creativity