Tenori-onanism

The ways of poetry and music are not changed anywhere without change in the most important laws of the city.
- Plato, The Republic (4.424c)

DURING THE INITIAL ASSAULT of the rock revolution of the 1960s, founder/leader Roger McGuinn of The Byrds told the author of the liner notes for the group’s first album that the sound of music was as critical as its style or lyrical content. That sound, he said, was an expression of the technology of the time. The brass-and-reeds of the Big Band era were the sound of music in an age of propeller-driven aircraft. The long-haired 60s was the age of both space travel and widespread commercial travel on jet aircraft, and that was manifested in the musical thunder of the beat groups.

The process in which the sound of music changes in tandem with the technological environment is a never-ending evolution. Since McGuinn’s day in the sun the sound of music has changed with the development and use of synthesizers, samplers, and personal computers. Music in 1985, twenty years after McGuinn brought forth electric folk rock in 1965, was as different from the sound of The Byrds as theirs differed from the sounds of Count Basie. That year was roughly the high point for popular music created using the early synthesizers and the Fairlight, the first commercial digital sampling instrument that digitized sounds from an external source instead of mathematical wave data. The Fairlight made it possible to record a dog barking, for example, and use that sound to create a melody. Among the musicial pioneers of that era were the Japanese group YMO and its individual members, as well as such fellow travelers as Tachibana Hajime and Suzuki Saeko.

But the Fairlight was very expensive, and it had six keyboards. Using one required both access to a studio that could afford it as well as traditional keyboard skills. One constant of technology, however, is its relentless thrust to make tools smaller, cheaper, more efficient, and more powerful, and musical instruments are no exception. Creations called “music workstations” arrived in the late 80s with the Korg M1 and its subsequent improvements that made the Fairlight obsolete. Nevertheless, these were still keyboard instruments geared toward studio musicians and composers. An offshoot of the music workstations was the groovebox, which is portable and produced for the musician performing live, usually for dancers. Some of these don’t have keyboards at all, and create sounds in way unlike any traditional musical instruments.

Not until recently had there been a musical instrument for the digital age that is relatively affordable, easy for non-musicians to use, portable, and equally capable of handling everything from Mary Had a Little Lamb and Neko Funjatta to Bach and futuristic electronica.

Then, in 2005, twenty years after the age of the synthesizer and Fairlight, Iwai Toshi invented the Tenori-on with the assistance of Nishibori Yu of the Yamaha Center for Advanced Sound Technology. Tenori is not a commonly used word in Japanese, but it is easily understood. It most frequently appears in the name of a type of Javanese sparrow that will perch on the hand of its master. On means sound, and is the root of the word for music. The tenori-on neither looks nor functions like anything remotely resembling what most of us would conceive as a musical instrument, but that’s exactly what it is.

And here’s the part that takes the instrument into a new dimension entirely: It also creates moving light patterns simultaneously in synch with the music.

Iwai is the designer of Electroplankton, an interactive music game for the Nintendo DS, and that influence is apparent in his creation. The tenori-on itself is a hand-held magnesium screen containing a 16 x 16 grid of LED switches. Performers activate these in several ways to create a combination of music and light. It has two sides that look identical. One is played by the performer, while the other provides the light show.

There are two built-in speakers on the top of frame, and five control buttons on the left and right that control such functions as changing octaves, adjusting the playback pitch in semitone increments, switching among the instrument’s “layers”, and modifying the beats per second. There are also two more buttons at the bottom and one at the top. The instrument has a MIDI connector, headphones, and memory card. It can be connected to play in concert with other tenori-on, or to send and receive music between them.

As the Yamaha manual describes it:

The TENORI-ON 16 x 16 LED button matrix is simultaneously a performance input controller and display. By operating and interacting with the LED buttons and the light they produce you gain access to the TENORI-ON’s numerous performance capabilities.

It doesn’t generate its own sound, which makes it something of a combination of a synthesizer and sequencer. It comes with 256 built-in sounds, but those can be augmented with a memory card. That means it can also sound like a harpsichord–or a barking dog, if that’s to your taste.

Iwai took the original on the road for demonstrations in front of an audience. One of these was at Futuresonic in Manchester, England, and the positive response helped convince the company to sell it commercially. He explains his objective:

In days gone by, a musical instrument had to have a beauty of shape as well as of sound, and had to fit the player almost organically…Modern electronic instruments don’t have this inevitable relationship between the shape, the sound, and the player. What I have done is to try to bring back these…elements and build them in to a true musical instrument for the digital age.

The best way to understand is to watch and hear one in performance, so here’s a YouTube video of an original composition, Dreaming, by Gianni Proietti. What you’ll see is an instrument that is nothing less than the equivalent of a hand-held orchestra or band.

The tenori-on has six performing modes that can be used together in any combination.

One is the Score Mode, with score in this sense being like a musical score. Players input notes by pressing one of the hot spots. Pressing for a longer time creates sustain, and pressing a playing note turns it off.

The tenori-on grid is perceived as a matrix. The horizontal axis is for time, and the vertical axis is for pitch. Intervals or chords are created by inputting notes simultaneously on the same vertical line. The time axis moves from left to right, and when the right edge is reached, it loops back to the left. This is similar to the sequencer function of musical workstations.

Another is the Random Mode, which is the combination of Score Mode and an arpeggiator. Instead of scrolling the sequence from left to right, the player activates notes at different points on the grid. A light travels between the dots to create sound.

There’s also the Bounce Mode. Players input notes that are repeated at different intervals depending on how high on a vertical scale a note is placed. That creates the effect of a visual bouncing ball, and the note plays when the ball hits the bottom.

Performers don’t even have to press the surface in the Draw Mode—they can just pass their hands over the instrument in a pattern to draw lines or curves, and the tenori-on will play them. It will also repeat the sounds, so compositions can be created in real-time by building up the number of passes and patterns to interact with each other. That sounds as if the player could easily create counterpoint. Speaking of which, here’s a Bach composition performed on a table top in broad daylight.

The instrument has an Interior Mode that enables it to be used as a musical alarm clock. It can be programmed as a clock—with the numerals shown on the screen—that can play a specified piece of music at a specified time. Now how many other instruments are capable of functioning as an ornament in the home and a timepiece when not being otherwise used?

Here’s another feature that wouldn’t have occurred to Bach but did to a man accustomed to video games: The Advance Mode. That allows players to customize the modes. Holding two of the function keys unlocks this mode and different, previously unexplained features in the Layer menu are presented. There are also rumors of other hidden features.

The instrument’s 16 layers, by the way, are another aspect of the instrument that Yamaha describes as “performance parts” or “recording tracks.” Performers can input different musical sequences to each layer using all of the six modes, and the layers can be played together.

It sounds complicated, but people who have tried the tenori-on say that it’s easy to pick up and do simple things with right away, even for people who know nothing about music.

Says Yamaha spokesman Peter Peck:

I can create sequences that I’d never be able to with software. I don’t need to know anything about music, I’m just pressing lights and buttons. Anyone can walk up to it and make something happen, and be inspired. With a guitar you don’t get that instant reward. But after that initial bit of inspiration, there’s also a huge curve of musical development to learn on the tenori-on if you really want to get the most out of it.

For a demonstration of that aspect, here’s a YouTube clip from the Paul O’Grady television show in Britain in 2008. Three young women calling themselves the Tenorions (or three young and attractive models that Yamaha hired for PR and trained) perform a dance number and then proceed to teach the host and the guests how to play Hello Dolly.

If you’re interested in learning more, here’s the introductory manual at the Yamaha website (pdf). And here’s a YouTube video with the inventor Mr. Iwai giving a demonstration in English (though the mike doesn’t work well for the first minute).

Yamaha decided to debut the instrument in England, and did so on 4 September 2007. They didn’t give a reason for choosing that country, but perhaps it’s because the British pop music market seems to be more open than those in the U.S. or Japan to self-contained groups of one or two people performing their own compositions with electronically generated music. It sold for £599, which was $US 1,200 at that time, or a skoche more than JPY 81,000. That price might not be suitable for a gift to children on their birthday, but it’s reasonable enough to make it affordable for even the interested teenager.

Whether or not the tenori-on itself will become popular isn’t so much the point. Rather, it’s a new approach to the idea of what a musical instrument is. It aggregates technological developments into a complete and portable package that could well change how people think about creating and performing music—and visual art, for that matter. Surely Yamaha and others are working on improvements to enhance and expand its musical and visual potential.

How long will it be before some talented people start composing music to create specific visual designs for presentation in an integrated performance art event, for example? It’s not possible to even conceive of the “advanced modes” the tenori-on could unlock for art in the future.

I bet Bach would have loved it!

Thanks to PB for most of the links and the title idea.

About these ads