Tomoya Matsuura Artist Statement
(May,2023)
Tomoya Matsuura (Kanagawa, Japan) is a SoundMaker - a person who makes tools and environments for making sound.
Matsuura is more interested in the infrastructure than in the sound itself. On a personal and material level, he is not bound by existing formats, but rather focuses on the level of the phenomenon that produces sound, in the form of the production and performance of musical instruments.
For example, the Exidiophone (2018~), an electro-acoustic instrument that produces sound only through audio-feedback, does not use a computer at all, but just as sounds that change depending on the acoustic properties of a space and the placement of speakers can have a very different listening experience when distributed through a computer, analog electronic By creating structures that are only possible with analog electronic circuits, it paradoxically highlights the inherent nature of computers.
On the other hand, if we look at infrastructure at the level of social groups, the focus is on media standards and formats for music distribution. There exists a biopolitics in which the makers of standards control their users/consumers, and the possible production and reception options for users are unknowingly limited by software, protocols, and platforms.
For example, in the “mimium”(2020~) programming language for music, the division of labor occurs when language developers arbitrarily delimit layers of abstraction for music, rather than from the perspective of a tool for new expression, as analyzed from the technical elements of language development. He is working on a critique of social infrastructures that can only be established by acquiring a technologist’s point of view.
In terms of approaches to production, he has also used media- archaeological approaches as typified by Paul DeMarinis and [Daniela K.Rosner’s Critical Fabulations](http:// criticalfabulations.com/) , which use research into past media that are no longer in use as a springboard for their work. He also uses obsolete technologies in his work such as acoustic memory delay and Whirlwind to ask the questions: Why did these technologies die? How could they be reinvented in today’s context?
The synthesis of these activities is presented as a non-existent academic field “Civil Engineering of Music” (音楽土木工学), that makes ways toward an alternative socio-technological environment by re-inventing literally “Soil(土) and Wood（木）” for technologies around sound by people, with bottom-up manner.
(Jan,2019)
Tomoya Matsuura (Fukuoka, Japan) is a sound artist who builds systems that describe and generate sound. These take the form of music, sound installations, and instruments.
His curiosity is not a sound itself but a system that describes and generates the sound. While he uses programming for varying purposes from a signal processing to a composition, he also makes an analog electronic circuit and primitive digital logic circuits because his works sometimes give a question to existing digital formats itself which we treat in a programming usually.
Feedback systems are a crucial part of the works because they behave like both stable and unstable from similar structures.
Tomoya is particularly inspired by the work of Paul DeMarinis which rethinks failed and obsolete technologies and media, and media-archaeological studies. He also uses obsolete technologies in his work such as acoustic memory delay and Whirlwind to ask the questions: Why did these technologies die? How could they be reinvented in today’s context?
This exploration is a combination of social and technical curiosity.
Making tools, is a kind of meta-creation. It is attractive that tool-maker can step into a deep part of a history of expressions. On the other hand, it also has a political effect that tool-maker can dominate and control its users, regardless its first philosophy. Tomoya considers, in fact, softwares for musical creation and distributing platforms of music are limiting other possible choices of creations and auditions.
Tomoya is interested in rethinking and resisting fixed and standardized formats such as a musical notation, computer architecture, and data structure, and to continue to propose alternative possibilities.