THE NOTE
THAT WAITS.

The first thing that came to my mind was thinking about the musicality the story conveyed. Having the task of discovering what those four notes Nova hums were, put me in the mind of a pilot from a distant future inside a fascinating story, where for the first time I asked myself: what would music transform into in the future? Not a near or imaginable future, but a future millennia away, where music like cumbia could be completely transformed into something else. There I found my own Ship of Theseus, and I took the liberty of leaving this to my own interpretation and imagination.

Focusing more on the story, it is fascinating; science fiction has that power of making us feel that anything is possible. The characters, in these first chapters, already have a defined personality, which makes it much easier to step into their place and dive into the story. The care for detail is something that, as a music producer, you notice immediately; you can imagine and almost understand what a Falcon looks like and how striking it is to see the sixteen spatial beacons turned into clouds of dust.

Once I read the draft of the first two chapters, and thinking about my mission of finding those four notes, I thought of the tritone: that dissonant augmented-fourth interval that in our human history was forbidden and surrounded by mysticism. I felt this was ideal, since in the story of La Semilla de Hierro this melody — or set of intervals — is also surrounded by mystery.

The "note that waits", to me, is an unresolved note; the progression of a tritone that stays on an F#, in this case, inevitably creates a sensation of discomfort or lack of resolution. The natural thing is to arrive at G and feel that the body rests, but in the story that G is the fourth note that never quite arrives: it wants to sound, but it simply doesn't come. The fascinating thing is that people, innately and unconsciously, know what that fourth note is, even though we haven't heard it.