薄明 HAKUMEI

May 9 - 27, 2023: Solo Exhibition "Hakumei 1.1" Sound Installation at ALTERNATIVE SPACE THE WHITE

Supported by

Sound Design / Umeo Saito (FLEX TONE)
Photo by Shin Yamane

HAKUMEI1.1 is a continuation of the sound and installation work Twilight, originally conceived around the themes of death, the dead, and Mount Osore. While version 1.0 was released alongside an exhibition at the alternative art space AA in Kabutocho in March 2023, version 1.1 extends and reinterprets the sonic materials, moving gradually toward version 2.0 through iterative modifications.

Music has long been associated with death rituals. From ancient rites to the Western tradition of the requiem, sound has accompanied grief and transformation. Yet, in Twilight, I wanted to approach death outside of ceremonial formality. I sought instead a physical and sculptural experience of sound—one that evokes contact, texture, and space.

The production process was deliberately material: tempo was stretched and compressed manually, shakuhachi tones were elongated and layered into new textures, and piano phrases were carved through EQ like a chisel scraping away wood. All environmental sounds were sourced from Mount Osore’s landscape. In field recording, even the same kinds of sound—wind, water—take on entirely different meanings depending on the memory and intention of the person capturing them. The living assign meaning to the dead fragments of sound.

In this sense, the piece behaves more like a painting, sculpture, or collage than a musical composition. Its ideal presentation requires both multichannel surround sound and high volume, allowing the listener to be immersed in a spatial, tactile presence of the sonic materials.

Thematically, HAKUMEI 1.1 revisits the paradoxes of death: its unknowability, its boundary with life, and the way it shapes our perception of time. I often return to Eugène Ionesco’s quote, "Everyone dies for the first time." It is this uniqueness of death that makes it so difficult to comprehend, and so powerfully symbolic. Life may not have a beginning in the way we imagine—it may only be the continuation of a vast organism whose only fixed point is death.

Through HAKUMEI1.1, I continue to explore these questions not as a scholar or philosopher, but as a listener and a maker—recording, sculpting, and assembling sound as a medium through which death, memory, and presence might become momentarily audible.

#202

Faint Light 1.1

In the AA exhibition, I created works that allowed visitors to experience the metaphor of death through loud sounds in the darkness. For this exhibition, with limited volume, I focused on the "cross-modal phenomenon" and created an installation to explore how light intensity and color affect the texture and intensity of sound, and the kinds of sensations that can be evoked through the artwork.

The audio source used is Track 2, titled "宵 SHOU," from the album "薄明." This song's theme, present throughout its structure, is "Tempo your entire life," meaning that the tempo indication serves as a conceptual symbol for "at the pace of your life."

In a sense, this could be interpreted as "at any speed you like," but considering the following three time axes:

Death of others (third-person death)

Death of someone close (second-person death)

One's own death (first-person death = unknowable death)

Despite the fact that recognizing one's own death should be impossible, we imagine our deaths and somehow know they will inevitably come. For us, who perceive time itself, the phrase "at the pace of your life" should change for each individual over the course of their lives.

Since I use a DAW for music production, I rarely make drastic changes to my performances or play them differently each time.

However, the emotional tempo of the work should reside in and be determined by the visitors' perception of time on that day, their emotional state, and the listening environment.

As if scooping up flowing water from a river, the listeners' ears carve out the sound.

*【Cross-modal phenomenon】 In cognitive science and psychology, this phenomenon occurs when separate perceptions, such as vision and taste or vision and hearing, influence each other. For example, a drink containing a sweetener with a red color is known to evoke the association of strawberry flavor. Also known as the cross-modal effect or cross-modality phenomenon.

Faint Light 1.1

A portion of the waveform data from the audio source "薄明"
A list of statements about this piece
Random output of the above text

I had GPT-4 (a text-based AI from OpenAI) create an HTML web app to perform these tasks, and then compiled them into a video output. On the right side, the statement text is being output, while on the left side, the alphanumeric strings are a result of a bug that occurred while having the AI write several pieces of HTML code. The AI identified this as a bug, but to me, these strings, which were not intended to be displayed, had a creature-like warmth to them, so I decided to use them as they were.

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