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The wildness of the island of Hokkaido, stands as the northern contrast to the rest of the islands of Japan. Having only become part of the country during the 19th century, the island still preserves its indigenous people, the Ainu, and their traditions which are rich in music and performance. Among their ceremonial music instruments, a small wooden mouth harp manifests the spirits of the island such as the fox, the bear and the wind. Maybe the lightest in weight in comparison with mouth harps from around the world, the Mukkuri might be the hardest one to play, and it's a symbol of honor and spiritual connection.

The work Mu•kku•ri is and immersion into the vibrational universe of the Ainu mouth harp. The composition was created using field recordings from the artist’s trip to Japan, after following an invitation to meet Kimiyo Suzuki, one of the oldest Mukkuri makers of the island of Hokkaido. Layer by layer, the characteristic urban landscape of Japan started fading, slowly revealing the wild nature of Hokkaido, where she finally met the woman that shapes bambu into this ceremonial instrument.

Using granular synthesis and phase vocoding’s parameters to simultaneously spatialize the sounds, Mu•kku•ri unfolds as an atmosphere of textures and grains that narrate this journey across landscapes and explores and expands the ancestral sound of the wooden mouth harp.

The only source was a 50 second sample of Kimiyo playing Mukkuri. The sound was processed using a granular synthesizer built on the software Max MSP which split the sample into 32 grains of sound, which could be altered in their frequency, rate, deviation and other parameters. These 32 samples were directly connected to the spatialization engine “Spat”, where they were in turn connected to a 32-object swarm spatialization. 

Paralelly, the same sound source of 50 seconds was being processed with phase vocoding “Super VP”, in which the parameters of speed and the transition envelope were directly connected to the spatialization, which, in contrast to the swarm generated by the granular synthesis, were traveling through the space as an ellipse divided in stereo, each signal traveling in opposite directions. Speed affected the speed of the transition, and the envelope affected the radius of the ellipses. 

As a third component to the composition, came the trains. As an omnipresent sound in the Japanese soundscape, it was natural to record a few different samples. At the beginning of the piece, we can hear distant conversations in Japanese that get interfered with by sound of the train arriving to the station. Using this representation, the sound of Mukkuri appears as the train fades, creating an analogy of the journey both in territory and in the listener’s senses. As the train, its sound serves as a ship that brings the listener into another universe where frequencies are in constant shift distorting the sense of time, and where sounds spiral around causing disorientation, which only ends when the train appears again by the very end. 

The work was presented as an installation and a performance at Freiraum Berlin in March, 2023.