The field of video generation with music or performances linked to intermediality is undoubtedly undergoing a continuous transformation thanks to multiple convergences arising from new technologies incorporated into software, from the methods of producing computer content, which cultivate the virtual, the immersive, and AI. What role can composition play in this distribution of trends far removed from the organization of creative processes that should belong exclusively to the human species? While on the one hand there are those who are profoundly frightened by technological innovations, on the other there are those who redefine their role by imbuing them with new meanings, seeing them as extensions of the human intellect useful for furthering the exploration of the foundations of the Universe. This would not have a disruptive effect on the arts, but on the contrary it could be the beginning of a new phase of humanity that is in historical continuity with the one considered up to now.
Among those prophesying this new direction of technology in music is composer Tatsuru Arai (b. 1981), known for his integration of classical music, information technology, and artificial intelligence. Arai is certainly not a composer from the bottom of the educational pyramid; he studied contemporary music, drawing on both the Japanese and European compositional traditions: first, he earned his diploma at the Tokyo College of Music under the guidance of masters like Nishimura, Hosokawa, and Isaji, and then perfected his skills in electroacoustic composition and computer programming in Europe, thanks to courses taught by Bernhard Lang and masterclasses by Wolfgang Heiniger. All of this was crucial to his progressive development of a personal aesthetic, one that offers a bold interpretation of the complexity of classical writing, ultimately leading to its overcoming. With Arai, we must rethink the function of composing, and especially of the structuralist idiom. In the writings that develop his theory, I found a diagrammatic chart tracing the evolutionary areas of composition, from the early twentieth century to the present day, with photographs of the main exponents of serial and post-serial composition. Arai suggests that the cycle of twentieth-century avant-garde movements has ended and that a new one has begun in the twenty-first. He presents himself as the rising heir of a new generation, of a new serialism to be considered in a completely updated guise, where composition is now above everything else, consolidated, explored with algorithms, magnificent videos and scenography, and a wealth of artificial intelligence. This is how Arai created Hyper-Serial Music, expanding the 12 usable notes in serial scales to 1,728 tones, and Trans Ages Music, a method for reconstructing music extracted from a 600-year-old archive, aided by current transformative technologies. Composing means exploiting computer codes, amassing real-time data flows, integrating algorithmic and generative composition with intermedial interactions (painting, dance, stage, stage design, costumes, etc.), a working methodology that rewards a different perspective on human creativity.
On his website, you’ll find many wonders to please the ears and eyes, but even more so, you’ll realize how the core of Arai’s interests lies in a much deeper desire: to transform the abstract laws of the Universe into concrete experiences of perception. In many of his works, we find connections between terrestrial ecosystems and cosmic phenomena, where the role of music and images (so deeply embedded in the sophistication of technology) is to reveal the geometric structures of the Universe. Science, art, and nature converge in a single universal language, as in Crypto Plants, where Arai used GAN networks to collect thousands of images of real flowers and cosmic “structures,” with algorithms that create iridescent and metamorphic audiovisual navigation forms. In works like Thermo-ton or Re-Solarization, Arai used data mapping of thermodynamic and solar readings (wave frequencies, temperatures, etc.) and transformed them into audiovisual inputs. NASA’s discovery of a flower-shaped nebula inspired works such as Garden 4.12 and Face of the Universe, with exceptional and intricate mappings of floral forms that suggest the ecosystemic balance of plants in our cities, linked to a millennia-old connection with the sun’s nuclear fusion energy. In the highly innovative interactive opera Vitruvian, Arai creates a new concept of Renaissance art, appropriate for the times, where the soprano shares a futuristic representation of interdependent, structuralist movements with a sumptuous audiovisual production. Arai’s system simultaneously organizes thousands of parameters (musical and otherwise) and establishes a very close correspondence between the micro-variations of sound and geometric visualizations. Even noise has its own aesthetics and geometry, whose infinite irregularity can be appreciated.
I was very pleased to contact Arai, who answered some of my questions.
EG: In your academic training, I noticed on
