Ese Mi parece un Mi♭

I wrote this piece in 2022 as an experiment on the limits of people and machines: a machine can play any note and any rhythm perfectly, but it doesn’t adapt; a person isn’t as precise, but reacts to what’s happening around them.

The guitar is the first one I ever had, a Peavey I took the frets off myself with a soldering iron. I played part of the piece directly on it, and programmed much of the electronics with samples recorded from that same guitar.

The whole piece uses a tuning of its own, with notes that fall between the keys of the piano: it sounds “out of tune”, but always in the same way. Over that tuning, the piece moves through time in two ways: first with no pulse, and then with a pulse that at first seems as “wrong” as the tuning, but has its own logic too.