ColourfulTone^® Research Labs

In 2006, in the recording studios of EM Productions, we were trying to make sense of hours of live recording: three Fazioli F308 grand pianos, captured at the Fazioli Concert Hall in Sacile for Oreobambo's triple album, Energy Journeys. In the midst of that work, something happened that we could not explain. In that very moment the Lab was founded — to study it, to research it, to understand the mystery behind what we were witnessing, and, in time, to turn whatever we might learn towards a purer sound, in our own recordings and in music at large. The body of methods that grew from this search, and grows still, we came to call ColourfulTone® Mastering. Two decades later the work continues, no software, no plug-ins, no shortcuts. Only long listening and the conviction that something in every recording is still worth recovering.

The Research Labs are the long, quiet work that stands behind everything leaving this studio, a slow search for what a recording quietly carries, and for what the journey into the recording realm, and even more so into digital form, has silently taken away. It is work measured in years rather than in sessions.

There is a way of listening that neither consumes nor collects. It is a slow practice, faithful to the same instruments, the same room, the same reference audio tracks. It does not chase novelty: it deepens. Each time the sound improves by a degree, something in the listener shifts forever, and there is no turning back. The system is not the goal. It is the dojo. The speakers are the pretext through which one sharpens an attention that then bears on everything: on the music one makes, on the energy one cultivates, on the way one inhabits the universe. It is not a philia for audio. It is a way of listening, where care for the object and formation of the deepest self are one and the same gesture.

The objects that surround us are made of the same stellar matter that composes the galaxies and our bodies, and they carry within them the same inner elegance of the cosmos: harmonic ratios, coherent structures, specific qualities, what the ancients called virtues. These qualities are real. They can be interfaced; they migrate from one object to another along precise channels; and their effects are measurable by anyone with the patience to wait their proper time.

The separation between inert matter and the world of meaning is a methodological choice made three centuries ago, not a truth of nature. Like all methodological choices, it is bound to be reconsidered once sufficient evidence accumulates. This shift is already underway, experiment by experiment, in cellars, in private laboratories, in concert halls tuned by craftsmen who do not know they are doing what the physics of the future, should it endure, will confirm.

Everything that is vibrates with everything else. Everything that is can speak with every other thing, if given time. Falling in love with Cogito Ergo Sum was like collectively diving headfirst into a deep, empty pool. Having reached its nadir, human awareness now holds the uncertain chance to pivot and reverse its trajectory. It is this potential that may free human knowledge to return to this point, and move beyond it, after a long and necessary detour. Whoever sees it today sees it ahead of their time, and has no need to convince anyone: time, a virtue in its own right, will do its work.

Margaret Penn 2026