NGALE: Composing an earthquake

(Developing the electronic part for the new piece NGALE, for piano, double bass, bass

clarinet and live electronics)

work for a piece commissioned by the Mexican musicians from Low Frequency Trio (Antonio

Rosales, Juan José García, and José Luis Hurtado), for bass clarinet, double bass, piano, and

electronics, where I had to face the sonic world under 20Hz and its curious laws.

Introducing myself and my music

through the listening of one of my latest compositions, Caged Bird, for string trio and piano

(2020)

Week 3

Addressing the problem

Presentation of my former work, I am sitting in no room, to introduce the problematic to

the class:

In I am sitting in no room, I used the recording of an earthquake, which I found a powerful

resource for that specific project, but which I could no longer use because of its low

malleability (I could just manipulate it, but it was hard to change its structure). So, for

Moving forward to a new approach:

Putting transducers inside of the piano.

Week 5

I spent about 2 hours learning how operate the recording room with Barbara Nerness.

Then, we choose the microphones we could use to record the sound, installed them around

the piano, placed a transducer inside the piano, and, pushing it against the instrument,

My first structural analyses of infrasonic earthquake recordings:

https://youtu.be/B7TnbEYX3W8

which allowed me to understand that each frequency is in fact modulated by other

modulating frequencies with the approximate same frequencies.

This, in fact, was the analysis I have made after understanding that the size of the window

could not be under 64000.

At the same time, I begun to research for synthesized sounds from actual earthquake’s

data

Week 6

Five oscillators emitting sinusoids.

MATLAB

Discussion about the topic with Fernando Lopez-Lezcano (CCRMA), who suggested to buy a

Bass Shaker.

With Patricia Alessandrini, who showed me her set up with her transducers inside the

piano. Tests with my patch emitting waves to the transducer inside the piano, which led to

the death of one of the transducers. This made me understand how difficult it is to control

the amount of energy that are safe to release on these devices when we are emitting such

low frequencies, and that I needed transducers that could deal better with them. Patricia

Giving up the visual analysis of the spectra

Due to a list of different problems: not having the knowledge of Python, not having access

to the infrasonic viewer (the company shut down its doors), not knowing how to work with

MATLAB or signal processing, etc.

Moving forward to a new approach:

Believing my ears and trying to reproduce the sound of the earthquake by myself.

Week 8

Arrival of the Bass Shaker at CCRMA (frequency response from 10 Hz)

Week 9

With Barbara Nerness. We were able to mount the cables, set up the bass shakers inside the