Technology, design, and music in Tokyo

As I have been writing , I got the futuristic feeling equivalent to the concept of “human augmentation” when I watched Dan Tepfer, a jass pianist, was playing ad lib, and in response to that, the computer program written by him was automatically playing the piano keyboard (as if his third hand was playing). In other words, he played ad-lib, and continued the play expanding his ideas while listening to "the reflection from the algorithm". On the next day (June 5, 2019) I talked with Dan Tepfer, his piano trio had a live concert at Marunouchi Cotton Club in Tokyo. While listening to his play, I was thinking such things as, "corresponding to his complex and calculated rhythm would be difficult for the drummer and the bassist". Let's quote just pictures from his twitter to show the atomospher. Had an incredible time at @cottonclubjapan with @jorgeroeder and @natewoodmusic . Thanks for the welcome, Tokyo! And thanks Y.Yoneda for the pics. pic.twitter.com/jM8...

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...