Makoto Oshiro

Makoto Oshiro is a Berlin-Tokyo-based performer and artist. His primary medium is sound, but he also combines other elements including light, electricity and the movement of objects. In live performances, he uses self-made tools and instruments that are based on electronic devices, everyday materials, and junk. His installation work handles sound as a physical and auditory phenomenon and focuses on characteristics such as vibration and interference. He is also a member of the live installation/performance group The Great △(夏の大△)  with Takahiro Kawaguchi and Satoshi Yashiro and runs the label Basic Function.  

I found Makoto’s electronic devices interesting, they somewhat reminded me of the Polyend Perc (though, the Perc is midi triggered instead of Makoto’s what are self contained motors.)

The idea of using these devices to interact with physical materials and create acoustic sound reminded me of previous visiting practitioners who liked focusing on tapping stones agains different materials.

I have looked into the idea of using hardware like arduinos before, as they can easily be synced and controlled with ableton. I also find the idea of running Pure Data on raspberry pi’s to be interesting, but i feel as though I would have to have a concept to apply the tools to.

DIY

I grew up on a smallholding farm. My Dad is very hands-on and practical, he’s worked as a landscape gardener, fencer, teacher and more. Although some things he does are quite ‘bodge-y’ he fixes and installs things himself, including plumbing and electrics. He isn’t very good with computers so I ended up filling that gap.

My past experience in games design is also very informed by DIY, with the indie game scene being one of the most ‘DIY’ modern cultures in my opinion, as you have to learn how to make every part of a game (the mechanics, design, visuals, audio, etc) all on a limited budget. Thus there is a reliance on open source and free to use software, with a close connection to the culture of forums and sharing code.

The Album Format

I like the format of albums and am a fan of when tracks flow seamlessly into the next, this might stem from the first album I bought on iTunes, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Time limits are no longer constrained in the digital domain, with the medium itself allowing for ‘unlimited’ storage.

The general consensus seems to be that streaming caters to ‘low’ attention and instant gratification. The trend of shorter pop songs, Tik Tok, and streaming income.

I was talking to my flatmate about how we each listen to music:

I usually listen to albums as a whole, from specific artists while she said that she usually listens to individual songs in genre playlists, both curated by herself and others (ai curation?).

Types of Listening

Causal Listening: Listening for the purpose of gaining information about the sound’s source.

Semantic Listening: Listening for the purpose of gaining information about what is communicated in the sound.


Reduced Listening: Listening to the sound for its own sake, as a sound object, by removing its real or supposed source and the meaning it may convey.

Deep Listening: Listening to everything all the time, and reminding yourself when you’re not. Actively listening, both in the moment, and outside.


Performance/Improvisation

I’ve written before that I don’t consider myself a performer and currently am not very into the idea of performing in front of people. The notion of performing and improvisation together is very strong. I often enjoy improvising when experimenting with sound design and have been doing so as a natural process while using Max, as changing parameters is so flexible it means that every time that you use the patch it can have different results.

I aim for my submitted work to be an improvised single take, something I’ve not done before, and can already foresee challenges, such as structure, timing, direction and managing audio level. I hope this will be an interesting approach for me to learn many things.

Using Max MSP

For this project, I have been learning to use Max 8. I decided to do this as there are many artists I like who have used Max before, such as Fennesz (who I recently saw perform), Tim Hecker, Jonny Greenwood, and Autechre.

Max, also known as Max/MSP/Jitter, is a visual programming language for music and multimedia developed and maintained by San Francisco-based software company Cycling ’74.

So far I have been really enjoying using the software. The structurally open nature of modular coding makes it inspiring to create things in a non-linear structure. This has been making me think differently about how to approach my work in comparison to using clips in Ableton Live.

Initially, I started by creating a basic drum machine (a kick, snare and hi-hat) with simple time-based triggers but found that I preferred to use samples and audio-in to process audio.

A drum sequencer/synthesiser and sample-based wavetable

I have mostly been experimenting with creating loop-based systems, with changing variables to a degree of indeterminism.

Max 8.2 (and now 8.3) allows for multi-channel devices. The current patch I’m working on uses 64 channels of the same sample. Each of these is the same audio source but all are playing at different random speeds, creating a blended swarm of sound. These are then each ran through an audio downsampler and then randomly panned before being mixed down to stereo. at different speeds, these variables change (speed, downsampling, panning) creating an evolving unpredictable soundscape. As the input continues the sample buffer gradually gets shorter until there is no longer space to load sound and the sound stops.

Below is an improvised session with my bass and Max

part 1
part 2
small section
The patch used for the performance(s)

Avant-Garde / Underground- Outsider

I wouldn’t consider myself to be underground or avant-garde as I find these labels very scene and group-specific, whereas I don’t really identify as working in a certain group. The concept of ‘avant-garde’ sound art has become more a genre than a mentality in experimentation and ends up contradicting itself when it becomes its own sub-mainstream, much like the concept of an anti-culture or counterculture that gradually diminishes to nothing but a romantic aesthetic.

I think the concept of such movements will become less prevalent with the continued evolution of digital sharing.

I think it does bring up the interesting conversation of authenticity. When we looked at the websites and Bandcamp pages of specific labels, I found the chosen aesthetics interesting, with Avant-Garde labels going for a more minimalistic and utilitarian approach, while underground labels went for a more DIY approach, with less of a rigid visual style. I found this interesting as minimal design is in many ways simpler to implement

Graphic Scores/Notation II

I’m not a stranger to graphic scores (I have previously made a blog here about them). I usually use them to create sketches for arraignment, specifically in the case of dynamics. For all the projects I have done so far I have used notation, though, this is to visually collect pre concocted ideas as opposed to coming up with something on the spot. 

Graphical Notation

The session we had on graphic notation was interesting due to the open interpretation of many of them which resulted in more improvisation than explicitly reading. My notation was not performed, however, I did take part in performing Uinseans notation, which gave me a good grasp on what mine might have sounded like due to conceptual similarities such as polyrhythm and counterpoint.

Though I cannot read classical sheet music, I don’t feel Im missing out due to the prevalence of recordings in the modern age. In centuries past, the only way you would hear music (in the strict sense) would be from hearing someone play it, thus written notation was extremely important in preserving a piece of music (written vs oral.)

I have recently been trying to teach myself how to play the guitar (and bass guitar) and find that guitar tabs are a very intuitive system that can be understood very easily, though it is limited (much like staff notation) to the conventions of western instruments and scales.

This got me thinking about something I read a while ago about signs that have been designed for a nuclear waste disposal site. The signs were designed with the intent that they could be interpreted by language (even going so far as a future where humans might not be around)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages

After the session, I experimented with uploading pre-existing scores to an Ai that created new versions based on the image.


In my first project, I used an image and converted it into a raw format (TIFF) and imported it into audacity, converting it to audio, to use as an element in my piece. The process of creating music in modern DAWs is in many ways notation. The graphical process of midi on a piano roll is drawn before the sound it emitted.

Below are some designs I created for the same process as above.

The sound above is the 1st image (grid) in Raw data.

I find it conceptually interesting to use images as scores that were created with different initial intentions such as the topographical map below (what made me think of For Airports), the tube map, and also made for think of the Situationist International