The author explores sound synthesis research. And his computer music pieces are dependent on these technologies. This attitude comes originaly from Musique Concrete.
The concept of ``repeating the same information" is important not only in
music, but also in visual art and even in daily life. Various mirrors are
tools to reflect or repeat rays.
By choosing
a mirror as the theme of a piece, the composer tries to evoke a double
effect,
conveying the impression of the mirror and musical unification.
Lyric texts are referred to ``Man'yoshu'', which is an eighth century
style of poetry,
consisting mainly of {\it tanka} poems,
the Japanese ode of 31 (5+7+5+7+7) syllables.
Three tankas are selected because of their relevance to a mirror,
Two characteristics of sound synthesis and music performance are as follows:
[Seymour 1988]
Richard Seymour, Michael Palin and Alan Lee, ``The Mirrorstone,''
Jonathan Cape Ltd, London, 1986.
The word Masokagami represents a limpid mirror used in religious services in
ancient Japan. It also contains the words for `shine' and `image's.
In music or acoustic signal, it is very important to repeat or overlap
the same information over and over again. In the counterpoint, which is one
of the fundamental composition techniques, musical order is produced by using
the repetition of theme's variation, such as inversion, retrograde etc.
In the meantime, the acoustic signal gives us different impressions
in relation to the delay time, such as timbre variation, reverberation, and
echo.
masokagami:
In this performance, MAX and Otkinshi are running on a Next computer
with ISPW.
Naotoshi Osaka
Prosody, or the musical structure of speech such as its intonation and
rhythm, can -- with regard to emotion, modality and turn-taking in
conversation-- convey as much as or more information than phonemes do.
This piece is aimed at finding instrumental role of prosody in order to
cope with real musical instruments. For this purpose, voice quality, pitch,
and intonation modification is done. This procedure is, so to say, musically
sophisticated prosody synthesis.
On the contrary, instruments try to follow the prosodic structure of speech.
All the speeches recorded are from actual Japanese dialogue, and the
speech is digitally processed. Performance is done using ``Otkinshi",
which is sound generation and performance software on NeXT computer.
The composer has been creating a series of music under the theme of
mirrors. This piece refers to the story ``Mirror Stone''
by R. Seymour. A mirror reflects an exact image of an object.
But it is a reverse image, and it gives the impression that
the world in a mirror is completely different, even though
it resembles the real world on the surface.
This story set up the ``mirror stone'' as a subject
which perfectly reflects things even the inner world of a human being. It also
treats the world in a mirror as a mysterious and magical one.
Although such an interpretation of a mirror is not special in stories,
the aim of the piece is to express such a mysterious and magical
atmosphere using sounds.
A timbre control technique in which a timbre of an original instrument
is gradually changed to a different timbre is used here. This technique
is called ``morphing''. The morphing technique is now widely known in
computer graphics,
but is still under study in sound synthesis.
In this piece, modification of a flute timbre is the main concern,
and morphing is widely used all over in the piece.
The are two types of sound morphing: one done by a performer, regarded as
an advanced player technique, and the other, an off line signal processing
technique done by a computer. This piece combines the two types.
Also, reverberation, pitch shift and various effects are implemented by MAX.