Technology, design, and music in Tokyo

In the past articles, I've been writing about the futuristic performance style of Dan Tepfer, a jazz pianist, who is using technology to augment his play, but in this article, I'll start from another topic that I talked with him when I met him in Tokyo the other day (June 4, 2019).  That is Shogi, a very popular intelligence game in Japan. You might think, "Why Shogi?", but I'll explain about it later. I briefly explained to him the following story. He did not know Shogi, but I told him  him that it's like a complicated version of chess. In Japan, about ten million  Shogi fans exist from small kids to elderly people, and there's a famous and authoritative association of professional Shogi players that only about one hundred and a half genius players belong. As for Shogi, human professional players were much stronger than computers until a little more than a decade ago,  but computers made progress rapidly and passed humans several years ago. It is i

#BachUpsideDown #1: Here’s Bach’s 1st Goldberg Variation, normal, then upside down! Been meaning to do this for a while. My computer‘s doing a chromatic inversion of what I just played, so the intervals are preserved. You get incredible harmonic movement this way. Whoo! pic.twitter.com/8Ul9jNZjn8 — Dan Tepfer (@tepferdan) May 31, 2019 The above is a quote from his recent tweet. Since the previous article , I've been writing a story that the jazz pianist Dan Tepfer's performance suggests the art of the future.  After playing the first piece of Bach's Goldberg Variations, the program he wrote is auto-playing notes,  each of which has the same strength and timing of the keyboard touch he played, but the scale is upside-down. Every time the original sound goes up by a semitone, the new one moves down the same musical length (= chromatic inversion). As a result, the tonality changes from major to minor. Why do I pick up these things and say "the futuristic rela

(original blog in Japanese 　日本語原文はこちら) On June 5th, 2019, the piano trio led by the jazz pianist Dan Tepfer appeared in the Marunouchi Cotton Club in Tokyo, a famous live house that belongs to the Blue Note group that many top-level foreign musicians, especially jazz, appear when they come to Japan. Since I was interested in Dan's music, his style of the play, and his thought about the music, I got in touch with him for the first time before he came to Japan,  and talked with him for a couple of hours just after he finished the practice in a studio. This article is a memo of what I thought during the talk with him, and after that. In this article, I want to write about the future of technology and human , in particular, when artificial intelligence (AI) is eroding into the domain of creation which was considered to be impossible for machines in the old days, what will happen to the relationship between technology and human in the field of art where creativity is believed to b