Matter falling into a black hole is a dynamical process that can be described by a complicated wave equation, which has to be disentangled from a system of PDEs. Computing the eigenvalues of such a wave equation allows one to obtain the characteristic time it takes for this process to take place, which physically is an interesting quantity. However, in general it is very hard to solve the wave equation or even to disentangle the initial system of PDEs. In this talk I will introduce a series of ways one can approximate and solve these types of problems.