Miya Masaoka has created a music-making monster. The composer, based in San Francisco, describes the Koto-Monster as a musical Frankenstein – a 6-foot-long, 21-string, hollow-bodied harp-like instrument with myriad wires attached to Masaoka and to a microcomputer. "It even looks like a monster with solder, glue, cords, and cables," Masaoka says of the beast she cocreated with STEIM, a group of Dutch technicians. "It looks like technology out of control."
For this third-generation Japanese-American, the Koto-Monster’s resounding volume and technological capacity add aggression – and shatter cultural misconceptions. "I bash a postcolonial myth of how so-called Oriental music should sound – a soft and flowing pentatonic scale evoking a stream – and how people playing it should look – different, mysterious, conniving, harmless, delicate, passive."
Jaron Lanier, a fellow composer, describes it more simply: rather than squeeze into old genres, Masaoka creates new ones.
This article originally appeared in the October issue of Wired magazine.
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