47. Reportage of a UPISketch Workshop in Japan

Yoshihisa Suzuki

The Meta-Xenakis Japan Team held two UPISketch workshops in 2022. These contributed to the dissemination of Xenakis’s concept of the UPIC (Unité Polyagogique et Informatique de CEMAMu) system to young Japanese musicians, as well as to people who are not accustomed to contemporary music. Beforehand, in 2021, in collaboration with Rodolphe Bourotte, the creator of the UPISketch App, one composition class was held at Nagoya City University (NCU). In this class, each student created a short piece using the application. After the class, some students presented their pieces to the other students. Three of the students’ pieces were broadcast via YouTube in the online concert Nagoya Electronic Concerts 2021 (NEMC2021).1

In the first workshop in 2022, twelve participants presented their pieces based on UPISketch. All the participants were university students studying media art and design. After a presentation of their pieces, they discussed how to manage a workshop for a more general public having no experience in digital music. They created UPISketch user-manual texts in Japanese, based on the UPISketch URL.

The reportage presented here covers our second UPISketch workshop which was held on 29 May 2022, celebrating Xenakis’s one hundredth birthday. It was open to high school students and others interested in music as one type of contemporary media art. The workshop comprised an initiation to the application, free time for the participants’ creation, and evaluation of the pieces by some of the young composers. Participants were neither professional musicians nor sound designers, but all enjoyed drawing sound; their first experiences composing music!

Media 47.1 UPISketch Workshop, 29 May 2022, Nagoya City University. Workshop facilitators: Yoshihisa Suzuki (NUAS), Mikako Mizuno (NCU). Sound Engineers: Kensuke Okano (The Ears), Itsuki Nishimura (The Ears). Workshop Staff: Takuma Osawa (NCU), Ryota Hayashi (NUAS), Mayuko Shimizu (NUAS), Erina Mizoguchi (NUAS), Kodai Ijichi (NUAS), Kento Takahashi (NCU).
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12434/dc186204