related links:

About the UNPLUGGED Updates

Man'yo Wounded 2001: Golden Nica / Digital Musics

Yasunao Tone (born 1935), who co-founded the group Ongaku in 1960, devoted to creating events and improvisational music, began participating in the Fluxus movement in 1962. His first concert, 'One Man Show by a Composer', was held at the Minami Gallery in Tokyo in 1962. In the years that followed, Tone became an organizer as well as contributor to various avant-garde groups. His activities encompassed happenings, sound installation, experimental music, performance and art and technology. Since coming to the United States in 1972, Tone has composed for scores, which utilize texts and visual image, as well as sound for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and for performing solo concerts at the Kitchen, Experimental Intermedia Foundation, Roulette, P.S.1, Guggenheim Museum SOHO, and the Chicago Art Club.

Since 1976, Tone has designed musical compositions inspired by post-structuralist theory. Using source material based on sounds converted from images, Tone's goal is to create an alternative to the traditional technique of sound generation employed by older forms of electronic music, which according to Tone, presuppose that the composer already knows before they process sign waves. 'The one aim of the conversion of image into sound,' he states, 'is to obtain sound I've never heard before.' In order to achieve this task, Tone utilizes characters derived from ancient text written in Chinese characters such as poems from the Tang Dynasty as well as 8th century Japanese poetry.

Tone's description of his 1982-5 piece Molecular Music is a good example. Using a sound generating system which includes light senses attached to a film screen, and oscillators connected to light sensors, the film projected on the screen creates varying sounds in accordance with the specific arrangement of the sensors and the changing brightness of the projected images. The film component when projected determines the timbres, pitches, and rhythmic structure of the piece. Since the content of the film is a visual translation of ancient Chinese and Japanese poems, the rhythmic structure of the film is also derived from the original texts as read aloud; thus, the original texts structure the generated sound.

Tone's methodology, further explored in the 1976 performance piece Voice and Phenomena, 1992's Musica Iconlogos, and his current work in progress, Musica Simulacra, is based on an intimate understanding of Chinese writing. The oldest Chinese writing was generally pictographic; it represented objects in a schematic, stylised, and conventional manner. Later, their writing system developed to a compound of more than two signs. Therefore, one can reduce or decode one character into a set of few images. To get the visual essence of the character without meaning and sound, Tone gives the following example: 'The oldest Chinese writing represented objects - plants, animal, body movements. For instance, ji (in Chinese, 'self') in a modern form, from which we can't see any realistic resemblance. But, if you see the old form then, it looks exactly like a simplified depiction of a nose. Another example, old form of wo (in Chinese, first person 'I') depicts a saw, because the character was borrowed from homophonic word for a saw.'

In order to create sound sources for this piece, Tone replaced the character ji and wo with a photo of human nose and a photo of a saw. To create sound from the collected images, they are scanned and interpreted by a computer as large arrays of pixels. Then, using an optical music recognition program that counts each array of the pixels both horizontally and vertically, Tone produces a histogram. These histograms are then converted to sound files by the sound-generating program 'Projector,' which allows the computer application Sound Designer II to produce stereo files, using data accumulated by horizontal projection.

Since these sounds are as short as only 20 to 30 milliseconds, Tone expanded them to appropriate lengths by the use of various DSP technologies. With this huge sound file-Chinese character dictionary, Yasunao Tone produces sound pieces with a computer program, including code tables that draw entirely upon an original poetic text. The content is coded in its entirety, and the arrangement of codes is totally faithful to the manuscript's original structure. Since 1985´s performance piece Music for 2 CD Players, Tone has been employing a second production step, a process he calls 'Wounded.' In the liner notes for his album, Solo for Wounded CD ­ he describes this process in terms of 'wounding' compact discs: 'I wondered if it was possible to override the error-correcting system; if so, I could make totally new music out of a 'ready-made' CD. I called my audiophile friend who owned a Swiss-made CD player and asked about it. I bought a copy of Debussy's Preludes and brought it to my friend's place. We simply made many pinholes on a bit of Scotch tape and stuck it on the bottom of a CD. It worked. ... To my pleasant surprise the prepared CD seldom repeated the same sound when I played it back again, and it was very hard to control.
(Naut Humon)




no comments yet