DVD Program Notes

Part One: Takayuki Rai, Curator

Curator's Note

Japan is well known as a country that has produced high-quality digital music hardware since the 1980s. When Yamaha released its first DX-7 Digital Synthesizer, I remember that its price as well as its quality gave a shock to the computer music world. Since then, Japanese companies such as Yamaha, Korg, and Roland have been playing a leading role in the production of digital music hardware. Computer music technology had become common technology for everybody, even a household tool.

When I left Tokyo in 1980 to study computer music in The Netherlands, the situation in Japan was much different than today. There were no serious computer music studios for music creation and research. The fundamental circumstances for creating computer music in Japan were well behind the USA and European countries in the 1980s.

In outlining our historical situation, I would like to note two remarkable events from the beginning of the 1990s. One was the establishment of the Sonology Department at the Kunitachi College of Music in Tokyo in 1991, where I have been involved. It was one of the early serious computer music studios in Japan dedicated to computer music education and creation. The studio started with a number of NeXT computers and IRCAM Signal Processing Workstations (ISPW), which was the most powerful DSP system at that time. Students from the age of 18 could start studying real-time signal processing techniques using the Maxfor ISPW software environment. The students introduced this cutting-edge technology at that time into their interactive computer music. It was a quite significant and favorable environment for young Japanese students and composers in the beginning of the 1990s and beyond. Some of these fortunate students have gone on to become active composers or engineers and have played important roles in the evolution of computer music in Japan.

Another important event was the hosting of the 1993 International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) by Waseda University in Tokyo, organized by the late Sadamu Ohteru, Seiji Inokuchi, and Shuji Hashimoto. To help produce this ICMC, many enthusiastic researchers belonging to the Japan Music and Computer Science Society (JMACS), established in 1985, collaborated with Waseda University, and the conference was a success. The first major conference dedicated to computer music in Japan got significant attention from both the scientific and musical fields. There were many Japanese listeners in the audience who experienced serious computer music for the first time and were impressed with the new possibilities. The conference had an important impact on the musicians and the scientists and stimulated the evolution of computer music in Japan afterward. Nowadays, computer music has become a general subject for both research study and music creation.

In the same year as the ICMC, the administration of JMACS was transferred to the Special Interest Group on Music and Computers (SIGMUS) of the Information Processing Society of Japan. Since then, SIGMUS continues its enthusiastic activities with about 300 researchers and composers, professors and students, and plays an important role in the computer music of Japan.

In the early 1990s, Opcode Max sold well in Japan, probably more so than in any other country. Quite early on, Japanese musicians and researchers were very interested in the advanced ideas of the Max programming environment and in interactivity in computer music. I started working on interactive computer music in the mid 1980s. By now, it is an increasingly popular subject in the computer music world.

In curating this "Computer Music from Japan" collection, I have chosen to focus mainly on interactive computer music in Japan. The program is divided into two sections: "Computer Music with Instruments" and "Multimedia and Performance."

All of the works in the first section except for one are interactive computer music works without any visual elements. Most of them have been created using Max/MSP and all are intended for stereo diffusion. Two works, by Yoshihiro Kanno and myself, include a video recording of a performance.

Shizuku no kuzushi by Naotoshi Osaka was performed at ICMC 1993 in Tokyo. The various transformed water-drop sounds decorate the violin solo. Shintaro Imai and Eiji Murata, along with Shu...