Miya Masaoka is a musician, composer and performance artist. She has created works for koto, laser interfaces, laptop and video and written scores for ensembles, chamber orchestras and mixed choirs. In her performance pieces she has investigated the sound and movement of insects, as well as the physiological responses of plants, the human brain, and her own body.

Helen Thorington: Miya, you were trained in Japanese court music as well as contemporary music and I understand have expanded on the playing techniques of the koto – first by using extended techniques, but more importantly, by building a Laser Koto. For those who don’t know, can you tell us about the koto and how you developed it? What is the Laser Koto and how does it work?

Miya Masaoka: Sometimes various events, thoughts and inspiration converge in particular ways, and evolve over a period of time, I would say this was the case for the Laser Koto. For many years I had been trying to develop ways of extending the koto electronically –and continue to do so— and along these lines I was an aritist in residence at STEIM in Amsterdam and worked with Matt Wright at CNMAT to develop ways of building an interface for real time processing and sampling using gestural controllers and other ways of capturing and modifying sound. We recorded and mapped 900 koto samples that could be accessed in various ways. Continue reading

CosTune (costume + tune) by Yukio Tada, Kenji Masi, Ryohei Nakatsu and Tadao Maekawa of ATR Media Integration & Communications Research Laboratory and Kazushi Nishimoto of the Japan Institute of Science and Technology, is not only a wearable instrument, it is also equipped with wireless communications functions that can communicate with other CosTunes. CosTune users can make collaborative compositions and perform ad hoc sessions with others who share similar musical tastes. Thus, it’s creaters hope, it may foster a novel musical culture as well as support the formation of communities mediated by music.

Music plays an essential role as a communications medium. For example, members of a jazz band communicate with each other by performing music, and the band conveys a certain impression to their audience by their music… Continue reading

The Musical Jacket–a Levi’s jacket that has been transformed into a musical instrument, complete with keyboard, synthesizer, and speakers, by students in the Opera of the Future and Physics and Media groups at the Lab.

The Musical Jacket looks like any other denim jacket, with an added decorative element: an embroidered keypad over the left pocket. This keyboard, developed by Interval Fellow Rehmi Post, graduate student Maggie Orth, and undergraduate researcher Emily Cooper, is sewn from mildly conductive thread. When it’s touched, it sends a signal to another processor, which in turn runs a MIDI synthesizer, built by Motorola Fellow Josh Smith and graduate student Josh Strickon. Sound is projected through mini-speakers in the jacket’s pockets. The whole setup weighs less than one pound, with most of that weight coming from batteries and speaker cases. Continue reading

Have you ever thought of carrying your piano keyboard with you? You can. There’s a roll-up, rubber piano keyboard available for only $30. Even better, try the “wearable piano”, created by Masahiko Tsukamoto, a Professor on the Faculty of Engineering at Kobe University in Japan and shown here at a 2004 wearable computing fashion show in Japan. It’s best worn with a pianist you know and like.

The cat piano is an altogether different creature(s). It was described as follows by German scholar, Athanasius Kircher, in his landmark 1650 work Musurgia Universalis. Continue reading

Ambient Addition is a Walkman with binaural microphones. A tiny Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chip analyzes the microphone’s sound and superimposes a layer of harmony and rhythm on top of the listener’s world. In the new context, some surprising behaviors take place. Listeners tend to play with objects around them, sing to themselves, and wander toward tempting sound sources. With Ambient Addition, I’m hoping to make people think twice about the sounds they initiate as well as loosen up some inhibitions. Continue reading

Our environment is filled with noise. The border between private and public has vanished. We are exposed to the situation and not aware of it. Our intuitive reaction is either to close all windows (of your room/ of your mind) or to cover it by loud music. What is missing in our environment is the sensibility.
Our strategy with the Acoustic Survival Kit is to work with subtle sounds emitted from special clothes. A person wearing the cloth interweaves with the sounds of the environment. With the filigree sound tentacles the individual fuses with other signals and information. In this way the individual acts neither passive (closing the windows) nor dominant (play loud music) but active.”

Volume Over Lumen is a rhythm communicator for several people. Each participant wears a silicone collar which sends a rhythmically arranged sound. A particular sound is generated for each participant according to an analysis of their voice. LEDs in the collar create a halo of pulsating light that radiates around the wearer. If another partecipant comes within the range of the collar, he or she can hear the sound generated by the collar worn by the first person. But if he or she comes within the range of several collars, then it’s a mix of the various sound compositions that will be heard. Continue reading

Net_Dérive, by Atau Tanaka and Petra Gemeinboeck with the collaboration of Ali Momeni, is a location sensitive mobile media art piece that calls for an exchange between participants in the gallery and participants in the streets. Deployed on advanced mobile phones, the work seeks to create a kind of musical instrument, thinking of the city-as-instrument.

Participants are given a kind of scarf with a mobile phone in each end and off they go to explore the neighborhood. One of the phones takes pictures every 20 secs and collects sounds, the other talks to the GPS (also in the scarf) and to the server inside the gallery space. Continue reading

undersound is an interface that allows you to listen to, distribute and affect the flow of music on your mobile phone while you’re travelling in the underground.

The project imagines that you will be able to add music to the system at upload points in the ticket halls, and download tracks on the platforms. Because of the architectural configuration of the stations undersound users would have to congregate at certain locations for the purpose of interacting with the system. Continue reading

Channel Communication Amplifier

The Channel Communication Amplifier incorporates the latest technology to transmit sound but has at its heart a device first developed before to World War II and the invention of radar: the acoustic mirrors built as early warning devices around the coasts of Britain to detect airborne invasions. These giant concrete dishes also existed in mobile and even wearable versions btw.

Autogena plans to build two acoustic mirrors. One will be placed in Folkestone, the other will be sited on the coast of France, 25 miles across the Channel.
Continue reading