to analyze diverse sounds, among them crowd noises, nature sounds, and machines clanging, permitting them to be organized and associated according to rhythmic, loudness, and coloristic similarities. "The idea was great, and very much in line with some of the more ambitious hopes that our group has for the future of music", Machover commented. Gale acquired an expensive new digital recorder to work on this project. Also in the fall of 1997, Gale moved out of the fraternity house and room which he had shared with his friend Eric Hu, and into an apartment in Central Square with two other students. Hu later said that Gale had mentioned suicide in the weeks before his death, complaining about being bored and depressed, and feeling that his state would not change. Gale had a relationship for months with Christine Hrul, a student at Wellesley College, but he had abruptly broken off their relationship in February 1998. About that time, he wrote an email to an old friend saying he was depressed and thought about suicide. Friends said he had mostly stopped going to class and wasn't eating well. Death For weeks, Gale had been asking classmates how to get access to the roof of MIT's tallest structure, the Cecil and Ida Green Building, which is occupied by the Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences Department. On March 13, 1998, at about 7:30 pm in an empty classroom on the 15th floor of the Green Building, Gale brought his portable digital recorder, which he switched on. Gale then wrote and drew the following on the blackboard: Isaac Newton's equation for how an object accelerates as it falls, along with a sketch of a stick figure tossing a chair. He signed it, "Phil was here", picked up a chair and hurled it through the heavy plate glass window. Witnesses said that he cleared the glass shards away, and then jumped out the window. Eric Plosky, a student at MIT, was inside an adjacent dorm watching television at the time of Gale's death, and heard a crashing sound. Plosky recounted to National Public Radio, "The windows of the building were sealed. So he actually had to throw a chair out the window to break it so that he could jump through. The noise that we heard was that chair hitting the ground. Some of the people in my dorm actually looked out the window in time