Blame David Sitek’s cats, at least in part, for the urgently clanging sound, somewhere between a gamelan and a fire alarm, that opens TV on the Radio’s sixth album, “Seeds.”

Mr. Sitek, the band’s guitarist, keyboardist and producer, has cats that like to chase marbles. So he keeps a bucket of marbles on the piano in his home studio in the Silver Lake section of Los Angeles, where much of “Seeds” was recorded. It’s a place he described — by phone between sound check and a live recording session for the Santa Monica public radio station KCRW — as a sunny converted dining room “on the side of a mountain outside Los Angeles, hidden in the trees.”

One day Mr. Sitek wondered about the sound he’d get if he held down the sustain pedal and poured the bucket of marbles onto the piano strings. He liked the sound, and recorded it. Then he kept going. He played the piano strings with his fingers. He hit them with drumsticks and plucked them with guitar picks. When he dropped a drumstick onto the strings, that sound was definitely a keeper. He recorded it on his iPhone, copied it into a sampler, and looped it. Eventually it would run nearly all the way through “Quartz,” the first song on “Seeds.”

That kind of whimsical yet thorough experimentation has been one consistent element since Mr. Sitek and the singer Tunde Adebimpe formed TV on the Radio in Brooklyn in 2001. Strange sounds have often encrusted the melodies sung by Mr. Adebimpe and Kyp Malone, who joined the band in 2003 (followed by the rhythm section of Jaleel Bunton on drums and Gerard Smith on bass). The band’s lyrics, meanwhile, have often called for some decrypting. But at the same time, Mr. Sitek said, “In our own kind of naïve mind, we were making what we thought pop music was supposed to be.”