1Ģ As noted by Johnson, auditory illusions are not as widespread and well-known as optical ones. Tom Johnson, 17 August 1972, about Rhys Chatham’s Narcissus Descending. In the meantime, we can just listen and be pleasantly mystified. Maybe someday there will be a musical equivalent of Josef Albers, who will work out a theory to explain how they happen. We know quite a bit about optical illusions, but I have never heard the term “aural illusions.” For some reason no one seems very interested in these phenomena, but they certainly exist, at least in electronic pieces like this one. But I have the feeling that illusions of this nature will always be created when pure electronic tones are sustained in a context of this nature. Of course, it could be that as my ears become more accustomed to hearing music like this they will stop playing these weird tricks on me.
And often I could tell that something was changing, but would not be able to hear exactly what it was. Sometimes one of the overtones would change its color and it would sound like everything else was changing too. Sometimes it was hard to tell if one thing was getting softer or if another thing was getting louder. Sometimes I found it hard to focus on some aspect of the sound which I knew, simply by the logic of what was going on, was acoustically present.
1 Tom Johnson, The Voice of new music (New York City 1972-1982, A collection of articles originally p (.)ġ Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this kind of one-note music is not the little changes which the composer causes in the sound, but the additional ones which somehow seem to happen in one’s ear.
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