Negotiating the limits of recording, meaning identical repetitions over and over etc., with analog and digital technology is one of the objectives of my pieces.Together with Dr. Fujinaga of Peabody Conservatory, as a software designer, I have been working on a CD-ROM project since 1997.

The CD-ROM, which is still a work-in-progress, has an interactive program that enables an audience to select 4,516 different pieces of music on one disc. Each of these is an exactly converted sound of the Chinese Characters of the 8th century Japanese anthology called Man’yoshu that contains the same number of poems.Thus the title of the piece is Man’yo 2/2000. As a single piece, though, there is no such a choice for the audience, so after I burned the piece on a disk, I prepared it with bits of scotch tape on the disk, a method I’ve been using since 1985.Then I performed the disk with my CD Player from 1984, and the Man’yo piece became far from the original and a completely new piece.