This work is about the conceptual and acoustic study of a crystal wine cup, about all the unfolded ideas and possibility’s of their emptiness. The starting questions that generated this piece were: which is the fundamental frequency of an empty wine cup? And how can we make this particular object with acoustic qualities resonate (being an object that has even been used in traditional music, filling it with different quantities of water and rubbing a humid finger over its border). These questions expand when we wanted to use a set of 7 cups (1) from the same model and size, because it is impossible to obtain the same frequency from every one of these recipients. The individual imperfection of every hazardously chosen cup makes an original of its own, and having 7 Cups is equivalent to 7 different notes that make up a micro tonal scale with as much as a minor third of range (or may be even more). This would be a microtonal scale with different micro intervals.

We come up here with two problems, what is the original frequency of this Cup model? There cant be an original frequency, so may be it is only the addition of these particular set of 7 cups of the same model that were chosen by chance that will make up a virtual original sound? (The microtonal harmonic cluster). Or in reality the unique originality cannot exist?, all individual cups are only unique possible sates of the virtual original?.
Lets say that the result we will obtain is 7 different microtonal sounds, some very difficult to distinguish between them. We have now to decide what to do with them. The seven cups can be disposed over a long and narrow sort of table (3 to 5 meters long), or over a wall stack. We make every cup to resonate with a small vibrating electronic object, a Relay (2), which is a Gadget that can vibrate to different frequencies, from 2 or 3 Hertz (2 or three times in a second) up to 40, 50 or 60 Hz, whenever it is driven by a sine way sent from a computer.

The formal sound idea of this work, it to generate different sound states, starting from chance operations concerning choosing the different cups, as well as choosing the rate with which each percussive relay vibrates     (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Hertz for second for example (3) ).
In this way, the cups are converted into percussion objects and not into smooth resonant objects as they have been traditionally used. But at the end, my idea is to search for a musical open structure fit to deploy the unfolded personality of an utopic original and inexistent cup, by way of exploring the hazardous set of the 7 uncertain chosen cups.

Is this a music work? A sound installation? A conceptual piece? May be all three things. Evidently, the context of presentation would determine this. But the metaphor about the copy of the copy of the copy, that some times is almost the same, and sometimes very different (in terms of frequencies, because for the bare view, the cups are exactly the same) is the essence of this sound installation that in its conjunction, tells us about both the individual elements of the organism (each particular sound result of each cup) and of the whole Group (all the cups sounding at the same time). Also, we are dealing here with the study of an empty object, meant to be contained by wine. The emptiness of the cups only makes sense when instead of filling them with their elixir; we fill instead the space with the cups sounds. So, we have cups that produce their own content, but not in a liquid form, but in a sonic form.

Dentro afuera dentro. La Constancia. Plataforma Puebla 2007.