When living things gain the ability to extract information from their environment and react to it, they can have a survival advantage.   So did our senses evolved;e.g. an animal might "hear that" a predator approaches and evade it.  

Complex beings process complex stimuli for all manner of information, so the cognitive effort after the raw sensation can take time.   This necessary delay, for human beings at least, means experiencing sense-data-in-itself even while reflecting on the question "What is it?"  For music this gives rise to a duality: even as we surrender to an immersive experience we might parse it and deduce some of its structure (or at least experience the mere presence of structure through its artifacts).  

Perhaps "duality" make this too simple: we can also reflect on the feeling of surrender, we can also reflect on the feeling of deductive experience.  We can "hear that" a sound got made in a certain way, we can hear that a sound is similar to different from some other sound, and we can "hear that" a variety of sounds enjoy some order or pattern.   Music is not just how it sounds, it is at least(!) all that the stratified listening mind does.

To Hear and Hear-That, as a kind hypercanon (a canon on a canon on canon on a canon) depends on "transposition up the steps of the overtone series (as opposed to up or down a fixed interval).  

From another but equivalent viewpoint, the many chords here correspond to solutions of the problem of expressing any given beat number, if possible, as the sum of four distinct fourth powers (a.k.a. biquadrates).   From the choice of that problem, and for mathematical reasons, a kind of rhythmic steady state emerges, a flow that neither thins nor thickens on the average, but nevertheless projects predictable/unpredictable variation (depending on the computational power of the agent who would predict).   In contrast to the rhythmic steady state, as the piece progresses the larger beat numbers require solutions with larger biquadrates, so the timbre of the piece slowly evolves from consonance to some kind of resonant dissonance.

For an ending, both a bit arbitrary but also a bit natural, the piece goes on only as long as 32 harmonics suffice.  



To Hear and Hear-That

Composer, mathematician, visual artist. 
Seeks collaboration with performers and choreographers.

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To Hear and Hear-That

David Victor Feldman