Synchronicity #1: Black Rainbow

A few years ago I was revising for some tedious exams (AS Levels I think) and, though not much mental energy went into the revision itself, a huge amount went into finding more and more ingenious and bizarre diversions (the same impulse that prompted me to start this blog). I came up with something I tentatively call 'musical synchronicity'. This is the phenomenon of what happens when two entirely unrelated songs 'fit' together - as if played simultaneously on two different CD players. Far from the musical car crash you might expect, this sometimes yields listenable, even beautiful results.

Here is, I think, the finest example I've discovered. It's called 'Black Rainbow', because it combines 'Black Is The Colour Of My True Love's Hair' as sung by Nina Simone, and 'The Rainbow' from Talk Talk's classic Spirit of Eden album. I've put the two songs into separate YouTube videos, rather than pre-mixing them, so you can have the experience of playing both. You can fiddle around with the volume on each to make your own mix. Below the videos is a bit more waffle from me.

So. I hope you enjoyed that.

These, then, are not mash-ups as such. No mixing skill is involved here - that would be cheating. Vocals have not been isolated, nor tempi changed, nor pitches altered. I have pressed 'play' (as you just did) and let the songs intertwine of their own accord.

The seeds of this idea were planted, I think, when I was waiting in the corridor of my school's music building before a singing lesson. Two cellists in two different practice rooms were playing two different pieces. They couldn't hear each other: only I was privy to the startling results, as the two melodies unknowingly clashed against each other in wonderfully strange and dramatic ways. And as I had revision to do, I set about trying to apply this to the records I loved.

Perhaps the nearest point of comparison for these musical blind dates is the so-called 'Dark Side of the Rainbow' effect: the crackpot theory that Pink Floyd intended Dark Side of the Moon as a soundtrack for The Wizard of Oz. While it's clear that this wasn't, in fact, the Floyd's intention, it's also clear that there are points where the audio and video really do fit together remarkably well:

I've chosen 'Black Rainbow' as my first example of this phenomenon's musical cousin, not just because of the rainbow theme, but because it's the best, the most natural-sounding. There a number of reasons why the pairing works. Both tracks are in the same key. Both are in free time, until the beat kicks around 2:45 on the Talk Talk track. Both are spare and stripped-down in their instrumentation. But even so, in combining them all these strange musical coincidences appear: the relay-race of Nina and Mark Hollis's vocals, the sustained harmonica whine that matches Nina's held note, the guitar that often seems to be doing a call-and-response with her.

So, there are genuine congruences and coincidences between the two. But above all the fact that these pieces of music can combine, in blissful ignorance, and seem to make such strong musical sense - this surely tells us something about the human brain's ability to make connections, to notice coincidences and disregard all those moments that don't conform so well. It suggests a neural preference for pattern and harmony rather than chaos.