The challenge is to express our experience of living through this historic time through a work of art. It was awfully hard for us to watch the death toll increases day by day. To see the statistics actually represent a person. A father. A mother. A sister. A brother. A grandfather. A grandmother. A son. A daughter. To see those numbers are not fake news. Those numbers are actually reported in the data given. Cold hard facts. Too cold. Too hard.
Robbed of the year of our life. Cheated.
Everyday, we saw those numbers.
Everyday, we saw the sound.
The Sound of Death.
Our hearts moved. Shaken. Our hands moved.
Despite death, the fingers involuntary came to life. We saw death. Now, we hear the death.
I don’t feel death. I know death is around me. Lurking around us.
The sound that we made. As ominous as it was, the death that enveloped us all.
The melody. The rhythm. The chords. The tempo. The music suddenly killed something deep inside of us. Snatched the pain away. Comforted me. Lulled us into hope. Into a strength that we never knew existed. We are in this together. Harmoniously. Like the music that arises from this pandemic. And it is real, it is happening.
We shouldn't fear it, don't let it make us hopeless.
We are lucky to be privileged with such to overcome this.
Unlike others.
To ones who we lose or have suffered, we see you, we hear you, hold on.
We composed the music using the piano in the living room. While our mother was laying in the bed, forcing herself to sleep, restless worried about her two daughters, my sisters in the frontline, I was inspired overnight. Until the wee of the morning. At the break of the dawn. Just like the music breaks through. Crescendoing. Triumph.
We were inspired by the man on youtube who made a beautiful piece on the first hundred digits of pi and thought of doing the same. I was amazed at how such numbers can tell stories. Stories using hearing just provokes a different sense of understanding to us, which is why we truly enjoy music. Every sound wave, every vibration came from a cause and for such little thing to deliver such message amazes us.
This quick composition portrays a timeline on the cases from January 24 up to now. With each number represents the story on how it is tremendously increasing, is assigned a number from 0-9 to a note within the A minor harmonic scale to make it into a piece. We have made it by gathering data from the NASA earth data on the cases of Covid-19 around the world and ordered them according to how it increases, the first peak, first ten thousand, et cetera. After knowing the main melody of it, which is the case numbers, We then made time to attach a background melody based on a similar chord to make it homogenous. based on the context of the case number, when we play the number of people recovered during that period
Due to the time restrictions and internet issues, we could not make myself to properly film (disclosure, this was our only shot I took) and edit this (iMovie) plus some footage could not be used due to some data loss and issues in transferring footages (sad :(( ) so with that we are only able to present the first half of the piece. The background narrative to what each number meant was not included as well in the video but pictures of the progress are included to view.
Thank you for your time, and stay safe! :)