Listlessly existing somewhere in a state between fluttering life and restful oblivion, musician, composer, and technologist Steven Hixson spends his waking hours hopelessly fixated on creating excruciatingly boring music that never changes harmonies. Influenced by mysticism, magic, science, nature, and religious practices, Hixson sees each composition as a realization of some sort of distant, universal, immutable truth, with each performance acting as a rite of invocation. To this end, Hixson makes use of spatialized sound, immersive lighting/projection, and custom electronic instruments and interfaces, frequently performing and navigating the chaos of his own sonic creations.

Hixson’s confounding ink blots have been scrutinized by some of North America’s most esteemed performers, including Béla Fleck, Brooklyn Rider, Transient Canvas, HYPERCUBE, and Aperture Duo. He has presented and performed his work across the United States as well as in Europe, including at the SEAMUS National Conference, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, TUTTI Festival, the California Electronic Music Exchange, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design, soundSCAPE, and New Music on the Point. 

A native of southeast Ohio, Hixson holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in Music Technology from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where his research was primarily focused on musical applications of virtual reality technology. Currently, Hixson is a doctoral candidate in music composition at the Ohio State University, where his dissertation work inspects the influence of misophonia on the act of music creation, the ritualization of feedback loops, and the aesthetics of musically applied chaos theory. Aside from his doctoral research, Hixson teaches private lessons in electronic music and composition at Ohio State, directs the OSU Composers Immersed spatialized multimedia concerts, and serves as president of the Ohio State New Music Collective.