Sol

“Sol” is the second piece in a series of compositional studies on musique concrète, and one of my most complicated pieces to date. Named for our sun, Sol (also a common name for our solar system in science fiction) is an exercise in sound as analogy. The piece consists of heavily manipulated single piano notes, natural As at various octaves with a single middle C. Each unique sound in the piece represents one of the planets in our solar system, starting from its edge and working its way inward towards the Sun at the center.

Starting from the heliopause – the edge of the solar system – the piece passes by Voyager 1 and we hear a reversed clip from my previous composition, “Unknown Artifact”. Past that, we begin to approach Neptune, and the first A key slowly fades in through one audio channel before rapidly striking its peak amplitude and fading back out to a subtle drone. This trend of approaching and passing a planet continues throughout the piece, with each sound fading into a drone and layering on top of one another. Each sound also alternates between the left and right audio channels with decreasing intensity, ending with the final climactic act of “entering” the Sun channeled through the center of the mix. A middle C against the tones of overlapping As represents the asteroid belt between the gaseous and rocky worlds, and marks a point of rapid acceleration towards the end of the piece.

Each representative note in the piece was deliberately timed in accordance with the actual distances between the celestial bodies (as though they were arranged in a straight line). As such, the time between the attack of the notes representing Neptune and Uranus, for example, is quite long compared to the time between the notes representing Mars and Earth. In this way, the piece is a kind of aural scale model of our solar system; the distances between bodies is accurately scaled down and represented between the instances of sounds here, and additionally the amplitude of their representative notes’ attacks (their loudest points) relative to each other are representative of each one’s mass. You may barely hear Voyager or Mercury, but Jupiter and Saturn should come in loud and clear.