Commissioned by the New York Youth Symphony First Music Program.

Selected for the 2017 Minnesota Composer Institute.

This piece explores the sonic world of explosions. The idea originally came from noticing a frequent gesture in my recent music: that of a strong attack followed by granular fragments. Sometimes I like to think of music as energy that passes between instruments, grows dense, causes reactions, and dissipates. So framing musical events as "explosions of sound" is not so far-fetched.

Strange Sounds and Explosions Worldwide is a smorgasbord of "real" and "imagined" explosions– I clicked on countless YouTube videos, did spectral analyses of explosion sound files, then electronically created my own versions by combining sampled and recorded sounds. But ultimately, I composed this score with my own harmonic and orchestrational ideas, and the music occupies a space between the physical and the abstract.

Explosions are, by nature, violent. Although some are destructive, others simply bring about natural change or are joyful celebrations. For me, the word “explosions” conjures up images of fireworks and slow-moving volcanoes, both of which were an important part of my childhood growing up in a Chinese family in Hawai'i. In this way, the sounds of explosions are a happy, current fascination as well as bittersweet remembrances of my home and the family gatherings of my past.