ELECTRIC LADYLAND:
Adventures in Electroacoustic Performance

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FIG. 6: Masaoka uses the video Adventures of the Solitary Bee in Bee Piece #6. The multichannel playback system surrounding the audience evokes a sense of being in the hive (Click for image).

“Having such a huge range of sounds available—and to be able to work with the computer in this way—is very exciting,” Masaoka says. “The Laser Koto expands people’s awareness of the koto as an instrument. The physicality required to play the instrument is something I’ve always emphasized; whether I’m bowing or scraping the instrument, it’s a very physical act. The Laser Koto is an extension of this, meshed with the Mac G3 PowerBook.”

Masaoka believes that the relationship between acoustic and electronic music is closer than most people think. To extend her instrument’s timbral range, Masaoka often prepares the koto by weaving objects between the strings. For example, she emulates synthesized sounds by bowing a small cymbal stuck between the strings.

As a result of her years playing Laser Koto, Masaoka has created a gestural and timbral language all her own. She plucks, strums, scratches, and bows the koto acoustically while waving her hands through the laser beams to layer an additional 12 koto-derived sounds.

Complementing Masaoka’s fully loaded PowerBook is a DigiTech TSR 24S connected to a MIDIWizard RFX Foot Pedal, which she uses for changing patches. At home she relies on a Mac G4 with Digidesign’s Pro Tools and BIAS’s Peak for recording, sampling, and editing.

Currently Masaoka is collaborating on new developments for the Laser Koto with Matt Wright from the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies at the University of California, Berkeley. “The ongoing development of the instrument has been with the help of Matt—right down to the core of the whole system, including how the pedals, samples, and controllers work together,” Masaoka says.

How doth the busy bee
Drawing on her interest in the relationship between nature and technology, Masaoka has created works utilizing ensembles of insects. Her Bee Projects series explores the social order and sonic behavior of bees.

In Bee Project #1, Masaoka combines violin, percussion, and bowed koto with an amplified beehive onstage. The piece sets up an interplay between the musicians and bees that highlights the slowly developing rhythmic patterns created by the droning hive. During the premiere performance, the drones were punctuated by the occasional solo statement of a stray bee near a microphone.

Masaoka also fashions pieces that use the human body as a canvas on which she builds dramatic soundscapes and confronts the audience with issues of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. One such piece, Bee Piece #6, was a collaboration with Joe Anderson, a specialist in sound spatialization. For that piece, Anderson’s SoundField ST250 4-capsule microphone is cautiously lowered into a beehive while videos of bees navigating Masaoka’s body are shown (see Fig. 6). Anderson’s careful placement of speakers throughout the venue lets the audience share the experience of being inside the hive.

FIG. 7: For Masaoka’s piece Ritual, Madagascar hissing cockroaches crawl around on the artist’s body and initiate sounds as they interrupt infrared beams (Click for image).

In her work Ritual, Masaoka reclines amid an array of motion sensors from Radio Shack, covered by an invited gathering of giant wingless Madagascar hissing cockroaches (see Fig. 7). As the cockroaches crawl over Masaoka’s nude form, they interrupt the sensor beams and trigger samples of cockroaches hissing, creating a random soundscape.

Masaoka relies on the human body for the material in Naked Sounds. “In Naked Sounds, I’m treating the body as a potential orchestral source,” she says. “Using medical equipment, I chart and interpret brainwaves, heartbeats, and the sound of the blood coursing through the veins. The brainwaves are output as a musical score that can be realized using Cycling ’74’s Max and MSP or performed by musicians. The subject’s brain activity can also be translated into MIDI data. The interface I’m using for this piece is the Interactive Brainwave Visual Analyzer from IBVA Technologies.” (For more information about IBVA Technologies, see “The Outer Limits” in the August 2000 issue of EM.)

“I think of the skin as a barrier between the internal and the external world,” Masaoka says. “The sounds from the body reveal what is hidden, what is undiscovered. These sounds are always there within us but are so mundane and functional that we ignore them. Naked Sounds reminds us of what lies within.”

Reprinted with permission from

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