Here is a picture of me at SFSU in 2012 performing John Adams’ “Phrygian Gates” for the piano department heads, at piano jury for end of the semester grading — probably sweating my tits off. When the pianist needs a page-turner (aka sheet music caddy), then you know that piece is hard to play.
At San Francisco State, when I would rehearse piano in those tiny, coffin-sized practice studios, the fire alarms would occasionally go off — tests, drills, whatever ritual sacrifice the building demanded that day. And they were loud. Obnoxious. NOIIIISY fuckers. The kind of alarm engineered to send a shockwave from your ears straight down to the base of your spine. Sonic warfare. Brutalist acoustics. A public service announcement written in pain.
Normal people — aka not me — would hear it and think, get me the fuck away from this shit.
Its peak lived around 3000 Hz, stacked with vicious subharmonics, blasting at roughly the highest legal level (about 110 dBA), powered by 24 volts of industrial rage — the kind of system meant for jet hangars, not college hallways. Our piano studios sat in the belly of the building, and the alarm itself hung from the ceiling dead center, like a mechanical god screaming into the void. I always found it deeply ironic that the music department chose a device so hostile to the human ear and installed it right at the heart of its practice chambers.
If we were warned ahead of time that the alarm would be going off — meaning there was no real emergency — the students who actually gave a damn about their education hated leaving their rooms. Practice studios were first come, first serve. Step out, and someone was already waiting in the hallway, pretending to read while silently stalking your piano. Composition majors with a piano focus — aka me — didn’t get first dibs on the nicer rooms with grand pianos. Those belonged to the piano majors. Territorial laws of the academic jungle.
And I had way too much music to learn and write to surrender my room to a vocalist warming up their scales because of a stupid fucking alarm. Absolutely not. Heck no, techno.
So I stayed.
I sat there while hell-on-earth tore through the building, annihilating any fragile hope of practicing for juries or coaxing notes onto staff paper. Instead, I plunked through chords, stubbornly pressing forward — and that’s when something strange happened. Something profound.
As the alarm droned on, my perception began to shift. Panic softened. Adrenaline receded. And the noise — this merciless mechanical shriek — transformed into sound material. I started hearing pitch. Structure. Motion. I used the alarm’s fundamental as a drone, building harmonies around it, singing into it, syncing my playing to its internal pulse. What once felt like chaos slowly revealed an architecture.
After prolonged exposure, the brain begins to sense rhythmic undulations hidden inside what seems like a flat, continuous tone. Crests. Troughs. Micro-cycles of amplitude rising and falling — temporal details normally filtered out by our neat, linear sense of time. Sympathetic harmonics emerged, stacking themselves into shifting rhythmic identities that grew bolder the longer the alarm screamed. Once the cortisone burned off and the sound refused to stop, time itself began to stretch. Everything slowed. The world widened.
This is a long way of saying that shrill noise — those “harsh walls of sound” we encounter in places like jet runways, rooms full of crying babies, or roaring football stadiums — becomes something else entirely once we let go of resistance. Once annoyance dissolves, noise becomes music in a way harmony and rhythm alone can never achieve. It becomes immersive. Total. Existential.
Of course, for your ears’ sake, you can’t marinate in that kind of intensity forever without consequences. You’ll go deaf eventually. But I think of it like hovering your hand over a flame, pulling it away just before the burn. It wakes you up. It reminds you that you’re alive.
This act of melting into noise is something I’ve done instinctively my entire life. Loudness rarely repels me. Eventually, it reorganizes itself into usable sonic material in my mind. Sometimes it even pushes me into altered states — auditory hallucinations, light tripping, a strange mushroom-adjacent clarity. Sure, sudden sounds can still startle me. I’m human. But fundamentally, I believe anything can become music if you’re willing to override biology and surrender.
I ended up composing part of a minimalist Catholic Mass — Kyrie, Agnus Dei, and Gloria — built directly from that alarm. The chamber singers performed it at the end of the semester. An enormous honor. Each movement was written in the alarm’s key, shaped by its harmonic debris and the reverberant character of the music department hallways, locked to the same hidden rhythm I’d discovered alone in that tiny studio. Me, an old battered piano, and that beautiful, brutal noise.
This, musically, is how we make lemonade out of lemons.
And that, my friends, is because:
“Every single sound is interesting.” — John Cage
I don’t have a video for my incomplete choral mass (yet), but here is a video of the SFSU Chamber Singers singing Stravinsky’s Mass which is far superior to mine. See if you can find me in a tux!