Florian Hecker: Speculative Solution (2011/2012) [EN, FR, JP, FLAC]

Speculative Solution is a CD and book with contributions by Florian Hecker, Elie Ayache, Robin Mackay and Quentin Meillassoux. Originally commissioned by Urbanomic and developed over the year 2010, this collaborative project brings together Hecker’s sonic practice and psychoacoustic experimentation with philosopher Quentin Meillassoux’s concept of ‘hyperchaos’ – the absolute contingency of the laws of nature.

In an apparent departure from Hecker’s previous release Acid in the Style of David Tudor (eMEGO 094, 2009), the four titles featured in Speculative Solution contain a series of micro-chronics and sequences of auditory contingencies, ranging from extreme stasis to the most dynamic intensities, crisp dramatisations of what Meillassoux calls in his text ‘extro-science worlds’.

As Mackay states in his contribution to the book, Hecker’s composition “participates in a circuit in which it, the accompanying texts, and diverse other objects, enter into a perpetual catalysis that must annihilate all priority, representation, reference, and even entity.’. Both ‘scripture and prescription’, Speculative Solution invites its users to integrate its sonic and textual components, as they enter into an accelerative cycle, becoming “truly ‘literalist’ marks which have no reason to be as they are, and which could have been – and still could be, at every moment – otherwise”. With Speculative Solution Hecker proposes that the concepts of absolute contingency and hyperchaos offer a rigorous new alternative to the employment of chance and randomness in avant-garde composition.

Japanese version was produced on the occasion of the exhibition Tokyo Art Meeting (III) Art & Music – Search for New Synethesia, October 2012 – February 2013, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.

English/French edition
Publisher Mute Song, 2011
Editions Mego 118 / Urbanomic UF13
Edited by Robin Mackay
159 pages

Japanese edition: Speculative Solution and 3 Channel Chronics
Translated by Natsuko Jimbo
ISBN 9780956775030
81 pages

review (Brainwashed)
review (Ian Latta, TinyMixTapes)
review (Adam Strohm, Dusted)

publisher (EN)
publisher (JP)
exhibition in Tokyo (EN)

Download (English/French, removed on 2013-2-7 upon request of the publisher)
PDF (Japanese, no OCR)
Download (full album in FLAC, removed on 2013-2-7 upon request of the publisher)
related: Florian Hecker: Chimerization (2012)

Florian Hecker: Chimerization (2012) [EN, DE, Farsi, AAC, MP3]

Chimerization investigates human relationship to sound, spatial hearing, and psychoacoustics through processed photography created by Florian Hecker to dramatize the psychoacoustic phenomenon of the auditory chimaera. The term auditory chimaera metaphorically employs the notion of the chimaera from Greek mythology, a hybrid creature whom, according to Homer, was “of divine race, not of men, in the fore part a lion, in the hinder a serpent, and in the middle a goat, breathing forth in terrible manner the force of blazing fire” (Iliad,6.181).

Originally developed at MIT by Bertrand Delgutte, Senior Research Scientist at the Research Laboratory of Electronics, the concept of the Auditory Chimaeras allows one to explore the relation between pitch perception and sound localization as they reveal a possible acoustic basis for the hypothesized ‘what’ and ‘where’ pathways in the auditory cortex. The concept of Chimerization takes a fresh and novel approach on the mapping and transferring of sonic qualities between different sound sources. While sound morphing has a tradition within the field of electroacoustic music, this rigorous scientific approach–the mapping and exchange of the phenomenal features of different sounds–opens the ‘phenomenological gap’ within the field of psychoacoustics while providing an intense experiential notion.

With an introduction by Chus Martínez
Publisher documenta und Museum Fridericianum, Kassel
Series: dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken No. 102
ISBN 3927015512
26 pages

review (Grayson Currin, Pitchfork)

project page
upcoming book with extended material

PDF
ZIP (PDF+AAC)
ZIP (PDF+MP3)
related: Florian Hecker: Speculative Solution (2011/2012)

Karin Bijsterveld: Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (2008)

“Since the late nineteenth century, the sounds of technology have been the subject of complaints, regulation, and legislation. By the early 1900s, antinoise leagues in Western Europe and North America had formed to fight noise from factories, steam trains, automobiles, and gramophones, with campaigns featuring conferences, exhibitions, and “silence weeks.” And, as Karin Bijsterveld points out in Mechanical Sound, public discussion of noise has never died down and continues today. In this book, Bijsterveld examines the persistence of noise on the public agenda, looking at four episodes of noise and the public response to it in Europe and the United States between 1875 and 1975: industrial noise, traffic noise, noise from neighborhood radios and gramophones, and aircraft noise. She also looks at a twentieth-century counterpoint to complaints about noise: the celebration of mechanical sound in avant-garde music composed between the two world wars.

Bijsterveld argues that the rise of noise from new technology combined with overlapping noise regulations created what she calls a “paradox of control.” Experts and politicians promised to control some noise, but left other noise problems up to citizens. Aircraft noise, for example, measured in formulas understandable only by specialists, was subject to public regulation; the sounds of noisy neighborhoods were the responsibility of residents themselves. In addition, Bijsterveld notes, the spatial character of antinoise interventions that impose zones and draw maps, despite the ability of sound to cross borders and boundaries, has helped keep noise a public problem. We have tried to create islands of silence, she writes, yet we have left a sea of sounds to be fiercely discussed.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2008
ISBN 0262026392, 9780262026390
350 pages

Keywords and phrases
Anti-Noise, decibel, industrial noise, dB, National Physical Laboratory, noise abatement, Dutch, Netherlands, Art of Noises, earplugs, player piano, gramophone, World Soundscape Project, Trevor Pinch, Rotterdam, North Brabant, ICAO, Barry Truax, psychoacoustics, Breda

publisher

PDF (updated on 2021-4-11)