# Two sketches



## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

These are the sketches of two pieces on which I have been working on.

The first one is a musique concrète piece: GW150914.

The second one is some sort of guided piano improvisation based on a couple of fixed ideas: PImp


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## SeptimalTritone (Jul 7, 2014)

Nice! I liked how the introduction of Hawking's voice on top of the gravitational wave sound felt like a singer coming in a song.

I have a criticism... I don't think that the rich gravitational wave background should have completely (or nearly completely) gone away at 2:20ish. It would be as if in a voice/piano song, the piano didn't play for the last third of the piece. A momentary reduction would have been fine, but there should be a coming back of the gravitational wave sound, especially before the end.

Also, another possible criticism which I have less knowledge of, but still want to throw out there.

How did you represent the gravitational waveform as sound? The reason why I ask: I noticed a "white noise" pattern on top of the main waveform. Does this represent the Gaussian noise errors in the collected data? The problem is I don't think that the quiet, high-ish pitched white noise interacts musically with the fuller part of the waveform very well. If this white noise were gradually transformed into something more pitched-ish or regular sounding, that might fit better musically, but the physics idea of small Gaussian noise on top of experimental or numerical scientific data doesn't seem to translate well to musical expression...


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

Hi, Sam.

Those are very good observations, thank you!

I think you are right regarding the first one. I think I'm going to keep it at a low level and then towards the end a crescendo with very fast canons of the wave, like in the beginning, that fades to nothing after a cacophonous high point.

As for the second point, I just used the sound in this video by LIGO: 




I think the background noise is just fine. I tried to maintain faithful to the original sound, trying to expand it rather than adding any kind of crazy distortions, which would have been much more easy considering the ridiculous amounts of possibilities the software gives you. You could say that I was inspired by Boulez's reworkings of his pieces.

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In other news, I just noticed that PImp (from Piano Improvisation) means some sort of male prostitute manager in English, lol...


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