Florian Hecker: Chimerizations

Electronic composer and sound artist Florian Hecker (born 1975) has made inventive use of contrasting and conflicting auditory illusions or chimeras--perhaps most famously on his recent acclaimed Mego album Acid in the Style of David Tudor, which brilliantly and bizarrely merged the two soundworlds of acid house and avant-garde electronics. Auditory chimeras have been previously explored in electroacoustic music, in particular by Alvin Lucier, but have never been as rigorously researched and exploited as by Hecker. This volume documents four sound pieces that dramatize auditory illusions, effectively composing within the relationship between our perception of pitch and the localization of sound, as we process the two in our auditory cortices. The pieces are partly transcribed using a form of notation called “typotranslation,” developed by Hecker at MIT.