Masaoka/Garton: koto workshop, NYC
10/6/2016




As part of the Celebrating the Genius of Michio Miyagi festival organized by The Institute for Medieval Japanese Studies, we hosted a workshop to explore "the acoustics and use of digital signal processing techniques with various kotos". Ye gods, we had a lot of kotos there! (I think there were at least 12.) I asked friend and colleague Miya Masaoka if she would do one of her amazing koto improvisational performances with me applying some digitial signal processing to her sound, and she agreed. We had a short rehearsal prior to the performance. Here are the two recordings we made:


One thing: the recordings are only of the processed output from my laptop. None of the original koto sound is present. It still sounds pretty amazing -- Miya is an incredble performer!