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Electroacoustic Music
Circular Lifeforms I (2023)
Circular Lifeforms I revolves around 4 contrasted sampled sounds–flute key clicks, a refrigerator motor, the feedback from an wireless microphone and a pipe organ chord–which are then emulated with a synthesizer. The premise of the piece was that the parameters of the synthesizer are then modulated thus changing the characteristics of the initial sounds and branching them in many directions but the interesting thing that happend is that connections emerged between differently sourced sounds that evolved towards the same kind of result and creating a circular kind of transformation. As the piece develops, the synthetic sounds begin to feel alive creating a sort of synthetic forest full of creatures that are constantly mutating.
Invisible teler infinit (2022)
This piece revolves around chains of sounds that form more or less long strands that intertwine to form a fabric of varying complexity. As in a fabric, these strands constantly pass one over the other, they change color and the ensemble they form creates shapes that are sometimes unified and sometimes contrasting. At the same time, the image of the weaving is a representation of the creative act that integrates these threads into a cohesive image.
Genèse du coeur (2021)
One night, during the first weeks of lockdown in 2020, I dreamt of a dark room full of loudspeakers where this piece was playing. There was only sound, the title of the piece in my head, and everything about the music was abstract and without a meaning–it was an outgrowth of the silence and the languidness that had taken over. The sounds therein were sounds of emptiness: curtains of white noise, delicate threads of pure tones and broken voices. The piece had a big impact in me and I could remember it clearly for a long time until I sat down in front of the computer a year and a half later and tried to rebuild the sounds and the structure I had heard. This transcription of a dream could never be exact enough–the sounds in one's head are elusive to the process of recording and synthesizing–but somehow the piece still stands as an imperfect testimony of a strange moment.
Viatge cap al buit (2020)
"Viatge cap al buit" (Journey to the Void) offers the listener a slow and transformative excursion through a series of landscapes where the real blends with the surreal and the impossible. The journey begins in darkness, with a screen of noise that evokes the sound of a plane landing, gradually transforming into water. A succession of environments follows, sometimes diurnal, sometimes nocturnal, where sounds detach from the landscape and embark on their own journey, ever-changing. The void refers to the intangible, the non-material that exists beyond our world. Through sound processing, this unreal otherworldly realm comes into contact with ours; the different elements that make up the scene wander between their boundaries: we hear supernatural echoes from the other side, and as they approach us, we discover a person walking. They sit down. The image they contemplate evaporates...
Nivulat nivulat (2018)
This piece is made using a cassette recording from when I was little. In the recording, my sister was singing but I got the microphone and, instead of singing, I started to repeat over and over the word "nivulat", which means cloud. I always remembered that moment because it was one of my earliest moments experimenting with sound. I made this piece using the loop–nivulat nivulat…–as if it were clouds passing by throughout the piece–always calm but in constant movement and transformation. And bellow those clouds I wanted to build a more frenetic world of noises and brightness that are never still in contraposition with the calm layer that envelopes everything.
Because the sound of the piece comes only from those 10 or 15 seconds of recording, the whole piece is sprinkled with the sounds of the magnetic tape. These sounds are part of the memory: they remind us, with the degradation of the sound, of a past time. I chose to use that sound, together with the voice, as a main material of the piece; and to use very digital sounding sound processes in order to build a bridge between past and present.
Three Strangers Melting Outside of Time (2017)
"Three Strangers Melting Outside of Time" is a miniature I wrote for a concert curated by the Mallorcan collective Placa Base, held at the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival in 2017.
The three protagonists of this miniature (the "three strangers" of the title) are three contrasting sounds. One of them falls into the domain of sounds with a defined pitch: the sound of a struck Tibetan singing bowl. Another sound is on the opposite side: it is a common white noise. The third sound falls more or less in the middle of the other two as it is made with a pure tone drawing a very rapid descending sweep that the ear perceives as a percussive hit without a specific pitch: it is a type of sound used in techno with the function of a synthetic kick drum.
The process that takes place in the piece is the disintegration of these sounds through iterative processes. Each sound is associated with a process, and this process is repeated over and over again so that with each iteration, the sound moves further away from its original timbre. The sound of the Tibetan singing bowl undergoes a random reordering of its harmonics, gradually turning it into a dissonant chord, the white noise undergoes distortion that changes its spectrum, and the kick drum undergoes pitch transpositions that create alias artifacts in the sound.
In this piece, I wanted to work on the temporal condensation of events, which led me to dispense with a linear approach and to present the processes that take place throughout the piece in a fragmented manner, with jumps, and simultaneously in layers of overlapping information. For example, the initial stage where the sounds are shown without any processing is not at the beginning of the piece but rather at the climax.
In this way, we only have an image of the disintegration of the sounds retrospectively, mentally relating various sonic events presented in the piece and discovering that there is a process that interrelates them. For example, we hear two events that seem to be independent, and upon hearing a third event, we realize the similarity between this one and each of the two previous ones, forming a continuity in our mind and therefore also realizing that we are constantly jumping between different stages of the process. These temporal cuts occur at different scales, sometimes at a micro-scale of hundredths of a second. This micro-editing of the material generates a different perception, no longer of a "jump" of the sound but rather of the synthesis of a new sound, contributing to this search for cohesion of the fragmented.
De temperatures i ordres (2014)
“De temperatures i ordres” is a piece that deals with very sparse material consisting of clicks, silence, plain tones and noise and explores the concepts of temperature and collective behavior of this material as means of structuring the discourse. As if these little sounds—that in the beginning collect around the extreme registers and end condensing into the middle register—were molecules rearranging themselves under different conditions, they form chains, clusters, gestural units and isolated objects. These different structures change the overall behavior of the sound, moving between states of crystallization, liquid flow and vaporous dissipation.
Harmonització de la sala d'exposicions de Belles Arts (2013)
This piece was composed by commission of the University of Barcelona’s Faculty of Fine Arts in occasion of the presentation of the poster conmemorating Sant Jordi 2013. The idea behind this piece, framed in the work on the acoustic space made in the Masters in Sound Art the same year and published in the editorial collection "Palas y las musas; dialogues between science and art" by the UNAM, is to make actively audible the passive characteristics of the acoustics of the Exhibition Hall of the Faculty of Fine Arts and, specifically, the resonant frequencies or room modes. These were calculated in a mathematical way, from the measurement of the dimensions of the room, and later translated into the musical language: notes.
The sound material is formed by the sounds of a cello (by Núria Palau) and a violin (by the author) playing open strings and harmonics tuned to the frequencies corresponding to the modes of the room. In the piece, these sets of notes are articulated in the harmonic, melodic and contrapuntal dimensions. The piece was premiered in the same exhibition hall in hexaphonic format, separating the three dimensions of the room into three stereo pairs: length, width and height. Later it was mixed in stereo format where each dimension occupies an area of the panorama: left, center and right.
Ring the Change (2012)
"Ring the Change" revolves around the idea of generating new content through the process of randomly recombining previously established elements. The title refers to change in the sense of transformation through variation—Change ringing is a way to play the bells while constantly permuting the order of their sounds—and it refers also to money and the coin as a symbol of randomness.
Two movements open and close the piece: "Heads" and "Tails", strictly composed using only one sound taken from a falling coin that rolls speeding up until it suddenly stops. All sounds in the piece were generated transposing and retrograding this characteristic sound which is two seconds long. Some of the resulting sounds are percussive, others are strange because they were transposed to the extreme so they were modified by aliasing, and others, which where sped down, sound reminiscent of bells.
Between these two movements there are what we could call "coin tosses". Each of these movements works as if many coins were tossed, each of them containing a short snippet of both "Heads" and "Tails" which is determined at random. Because each of this coins would fall in a different place and not in the same order they appeared in "Heads" or "Tails", every snippet appears also in a random temporal position and has some probability to be further transposed. In this way "Heads" and "Tails" are mixed and recombined in every movement.
"Ring the Change" exists in a fixed version, that includes four carefully selected "tosses", and a generative version, as a Max/MSP patch, where the user can select the number of tosses desired.
Pupal Again (2012)
The development of the sound stops and a different music abruptly awakes from the unexpected sleep of the former. Soon, it will be pupal again.
Unearthed Utterance (2009)
"Unearthed Utterance" is a spectral study where a block of sound (a four-part choral harmony) is sculpted in order to reveal melodies hidden behind a labyrinth of frequencies that weave the human voice. These threads of sound navigate between the abstract nature of pure tones, with their volatile melodies, and the recognizable sound of the voice that imposes its character with the vibrato and respiration.
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