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Toshi Tsuruoka
Selected Representative Works

Live Performance

at Shibuya WWW

Live Electronics and Poetry

with Ashley Muniz (Poet and Voice)

December, 2022

My partner and I work as an electronic music and poetry duo called Toshi and Ashley. This performance is a 20-minute continuous storytelling piece with poetry reading and electronics. I used a DJ mixer as an instrument, maneuvering freely through poetic scenes along with an Ableton Live session. Ashley's voice was used to contrast with the electronic world as well as blend in through real-time manipulation.

at Polaris Tokyo

Live Electronics Improvisation

with Joo Jeonghyeon (Haeguem) and Leo Chang (Gongs and Electronics)

March, 2024

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Collaborating with Korean native artists and instruments, I live manipulated the haegeum and gong performance using Max MSP and iPhone as a control surface. A live sampling and manipulating patch was designed so that my electronically synthesized sound could weave through and between the acoustic instruments, while an iPhone control surface was designed to freely and nimbly control parameters, allowing me to improvise in the moment.​

Teaching

at Saidera Mastering Studio

Audio Production Lessons

DAW (Pro Tools, Ableton Live, Logic Pro) fundamentals, Max MSP Coding, and Advanced Sound Design

At Saidera Mastering, I work as a mastering engineer as well as a teacher for online and in-person lessons. The curriculum varies student to student, from fundamental knowledge in editing and recording to advanced sound design methods. I am also dedicated to educating the public on new immersive formats such as SONY 360 Reality Audio and Dolby Atmos.

2020~current

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Guest Lecturer

Tokyo University of the Arts (Max Summer School 2021, Link)

LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore (2020~2022)

In summer of 2021, I was invited to discuss my approach in electronic music at Max Summer School, hosted at Tokyo University of the Arts. It is truly my passion to share and exchange ideas in electronic composition with students and faculty members.

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Professor Justin Hegburg at LASALLE College of the Arts invited me to his mastering course from 2020~2022. As a guest lecturer, I discussed theories in mastering and my technique.

In 2021, Prof. Hegburg and I developed a virtual mastering console application that simulates the analog console. This was used to teach students the analog mastering workflow, despite the fact that the students could not access the school studio due to the lockdown. The goal was to make an comprehensive yet easy-to-grasp tool for students to understand the overall workflow of mastering.

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Research

Ear Talk Project

Cambridge University Press, 2022 (Link)

ICMC Proceedings Santiago, Chile 2021 (Link)

SEAMUS Conference, 2021 (Link)

The Ear Talk project enables people from remote locations to collaboratively share, shape, and form music via an interactive score. Through the crowdsourcing of recordings and creative directions from participants, the Ear Talk project aims to create music online. We “hacked” YouTube’s live streaming capability and created an ever-changing visual score. 

 

Our goal is to establish an online environment where experienced composers as well as novices could participate without having to learn specific skills. For this reason, Ear Talk’s compositional process is conducted via verbal communication over YouTube live chat messages that interact with the live streamed score in real-time.

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This project was created and executed in collaboration with the ensemble Consensus, whose focus is to explore different types of scores and various ways of communication that influence musical play. “The result is a blurring of boundaries between rehearsal and performance; composition and improvisation.” - Consensus

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Installations

at InterBee 2023

5.1 ch surround installation

Multichannel piece for an international exhibition

November, 2023

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InterBee is an international exhibition of innovative video and audio technology. I wrote a piece for the exhibition that demonstrated 5.1 speaker setup by Eclipse, and acoustic panels by Shizuka panels. Visitors were invited to enter a pseudo anechoic chamber and enjoy an acute sense of immersive sound space, where synthesized sound and sampled voice surrounded the listeners. 

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at The ELO Conference and Media Arts Festival

for 21 speaker arrays and 6 video screens 

with Ashley Muniz (Poet and Voice)

July, 2020

六情 (roku-jō) takes a deep dive into the art of Japanese calligraphy and beauty of Japanese letters—kanji—as we capture the movements of brush strokes and use them as input data for sonification. This work cross-pollinates the expressional facets of kanji, a logographic writing system that communicates the entire meaning of a word in a single letter, with auditory sounds that aim to magnify emotions evoked by these letters. 

© 2021 All Rights Reserved.

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