World Premiere
Play with Light, Image, and Sound 2025
(Mid-Japan Sound Art Festival 2025)

Date｜30 August 2025
Venue｜Sound Design Lab, Acoustics Design Studio
　　 Nagoya City University, Kita-Chikusa Campus

Shitatari and Resonant Depth are hybrid piano works created on the basis of themes that have driven my recent interests: the documentation and reinterpretation of natural sounds, the relationship between performance and machine processing, and the perceptual instability surrounding the source of sound.

In Shitatari, the starting point was recordings of water droplets captured at the ruins of Oka Castle in Taketa, Ōita Prefecture. Groundwater drips at steady intervals from a crack in the decayed earth. As I listened closely to that rhythm, I felt a natural groove emerging: repetitive yet constantly shifting. Responding to this “environmental beat,” I developed a structure that intersects piano and electroacoustic sound. The soundboard is resonated through transducers, the piano’s performance is captured by pickup microphones, and both are modulated in real time with the electronics. The work takes the form of live electronics, where recording, notation, and improvisation overlap.

Resonant Depth advances this method further. The sound of a suikinkutsu was recorded and analyzed. Rhythms and pitches extracted from its spectral information were converted into MIDI data. An unmanned Disklavier performs automatically, while exciters vibrate the soundboard so that the sound of the water droplets themselves is re-projected through the body of the piano. Multiple transformations occur: from natural sound to analysis, to instrumental performance, to re-resonance, to electroacoustics. The boundaries between human and machine, nature and synthesis, cross and blur in several layers.

In both works, I seek to collect the melodies and rhythms hidden in natural environments, extend and transform them, and reconstruct them as new sonic spaces. Instead of the instrument “playing,” the roles seem inverted: the instrument “listens,” or the environment “makes the instrument play.”

For me, mixed music is a form of translation that connects people and environment, past and present, material and abstract.