Last November, I travelled to Japan for the first time since the pandemic.
I was able to meet with friends and perform in Kagoshima, Kyoto and Kamakura.
Today, I want to introduce you to the event I played in Kamakura. It was organised by my best friends, Enokida Ryuji and his wife Tomoko.
The spirit of Satsuma
Ryuji is from Satsuma Sendai in Kagoshima and has the true heart of a Satsuma man. Tenacious, resourceful and impeccably honest, one could not ask for a better friend. We met for the first time at Fumon's studio in Horikiri in 1998, where he was beginning to learn Satsumabiwa. He’d been blown away by Fumon's performance at the Meiji Shrine in May that year. Needless to say, we hit it off immediately and have been friends ever since.
He’s the CEO of the Earth Voice Project, a company focused on film production, education, event management, brand management and consultation. I think his company's description centres on the following message:
“Our skill is in shining a light on new relationships within everything around us and making these links and connections reach their greatest potential”.
Hypersonic effect
Enokida asked me to play Satsumabiwa at an event organised for one of his clients, Taniguchi Masatsugu. Taniguchi is very passionate about Oohashi Tsutomu's research into the ‘hypersonic effect’. I knew next to nothing about this phenomenon prior to the event.
The hypersonic effect concerns changes to the brain that occur with frequencies above 40kHz, way beyond the threshold of hearing for humans which is 22kHz at best.
Oohashi Tsutomu – a musician and a scientist
Oohashi is both a scientist and an accomplished composer and musician. In 1974, he founded Geinoh Yamashirogumi, a collective for exploring folk music and combining traditional and modern instruments. He composes under the pseudonym Yamashiro Shoji and is famed for writing the film score for the 1988 Japanese Anime movie Akira. Indonesian Gamelan and Japanese Noh featured prominently in this work but he has explored many other folk traditions in his activities.
As a researcher, Oohashi been involved in environment informatics as well as neuroscience. Environment informatics is a study of the information and data found in the environment. It sees beyond the understanding that the environment involves matter and energy alone. I get the sense from his writing that one of his goals as a researcher is to find and study the lifestyle of the people living in that environment most conducive to a healthy life. His scholarship has focused on the study of sound and the brain.
In his research, he travelled to the rainforests of present-day Congo. There he studied the sound environment of the Mbuti people in the Ituri forest. He has a beautiful description of his reaction to this soundscape in his book 'Hypersonic Effect', which I’m reading at the moment. I feel that this experience challenged his assumptions about what makes for a comfortable and healthy sound world.
A new paradigm
This trip undoubtedly connected with Oohashi’s research to understand the experience of listening. One question he studied was why some people were dissatisfied with digital audio — and especially the decision to limit the sound frequency range in audio recordings to the range perceived by the human ear.
Instead of taking subjective responses alone as his basis for research, he also measured brain wave patterns and notably blood flow within the brain. This led to the remarkable breakthrough in relation to frequencies above the threshold of hearing.
Astonishingly, his findings were that the brain reacted differently to the presence or absence of frequencies above the threshold of hearing. First of all, there was a change in alpha wave patterns. Furthermore, blood flow changed in areas of the brain not associated with hearing, but rather in the deeper structures of the brain, particularly areas associated with the reward system.
There was increased blood flow to the hypothalamus with beneficial hormonal changes, immunity response and neurotransmission. This occurred in response to frequencies above 40kHz. Notably, a negative effect was noticed for frequencies between 16kHz and 40kHz.
Quite unexpectedly, when higher frequencies were played isolated from the associated frequencies in the audible range, nothing happened!
Oohashi called these changes the ‘hypersonic effect’. This effect would manifest some 40 seconds after the higher frequencies began. It would continue for 100 seconds after the higher frequencies stopped.
Hypersonics and musical instruments
Oohashi also studied hypersonic frequencies when musical instruments were played. The piano had an upper limit of 20kHz — it didn’t go beyond the threshold of hearing. The recorder didn’t have them either.
Fuke Shakuhachi, on the other hand, had a range which extended 10 times further than the piano to 200kHz. Gamelan produced a similar range of frequencies. He found that all Japanese Instruments produce frequencies above 40kHz in the range that can induce the hypersonic effect. Among Western instruments, the frequencies necessary to produce the effect were found with the harpsichord.
Back to Africa
Returning to Oohashi's research in the Congo, the soundscape of the rainforest was rich in high frequencies similar to those found in Gamelan and Shakuhachi that induce the hypersonic effect. The sound of insects, wind in the trees, shuffling through fallen leaves — all of these produce the frequencies necessary.
I love walking through leaves so much. Ever since I was a child, I have relished every and any opportunity to do this, sometimes to the great embarrassment of company.
Our industrialised environment, on the other hand is filled with frequencies below the 40kHz range. The results seem to say that vehicles, machinery and all the noises we hear in urban environments chip away at us.
A return to nature
Taniguchi was deeply moved by the beneficial aspects of the hypersonic effects found in the natural environment.
He first became interested in the hypersonic effect and environmental informatics after hearing a talk by Oohashi in the early 2000s.
As a child, he loved nature. He was living in Hiroshima when the city was destroyed by the Allies in the final days of World War 2 and remained there following the dropping of the atomic bomb. He was deeply impressed by how the plants, insects and small animals lived through the catastrophe and generally how nature recovered. He pursued a career in engineering but also realised his childhood dream of becoming an artist.
He gave a talk before I performed at Canon House. His message was simple.
In Oohashi's book, there is much talk about how to recreate the hypersonic effect in recordings — what bit rates would be good, etc.
However, we live in a society where humanity is tearing itself apart. High suicide rates, murder, criminality, hikikomori (social withdrawal) and fear of social interaction are everywhere around us.
The hypersonic effect could have a profound healing effect on people. Its important to get humanity to experience nature rather than focus on artificiality all the time.
Exploring for hypersonics
With this in mind, Taniguchi had sought the help of Enokida to make a video for distribution. Enokida was joined on the day by Takizawa Shin, Chief Operating Officer at Sustainable Investor. I enjoyed meeting with Takizawa very much.
Their first task in this adventure was to find a microphone that could record higher frequencies and an application that could display the results. After much consultation with researchers in academia and industry, they got a hint about a company in Sweden that manufactured microphones and applications for recording bats, Pettersson Elektronik. Their devices could record up to 200kHz.
Suitably armed up, they went out into the natural environment of Japan to find stimuli for the hypersonic effect.
In the talk at Canon House, they presented their results of different examples of sounds in nature. These included insects, leaves and water. Enokida had also set up a microphone and display for the audience to see the frequency patterns of different stimuli live during the event.
One of the most interesting of the examples selected for live demonstration was a tamagushi. It was also the one richest with high frequencies. This is a branch of sakaki (Cleyera japonica) with Japanese washi paper. It is used in Shinto religious rites. When Taniguchi waved it near the microphone the whole screen lit up with a full spectrum effect.
I couldn't help but ask myself whether people were instinctively aware of this effect in the past.
Taniguchi also introduced me to iwabue. These are stones that have been shaped through natural processes such that there is a naturally formed embouchure hole. Along with horagai (the shell of the Triton's Trumpet), iwabue have been in use for millennia as musical instruments in the religious rites of Shinto, animism faiths and mountain worship in Japan.
Taniguchi finds common ground with the French Christian Existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel in his criticism of the Cartesian dualistic separation of mind and body. Marcel was also critical of reducing ourselves to the role or function we play in the abstract concepts that make up what we know as society and subsequently failing to realise our lives as deeply personal experiences of each other and the gift of the natural world.
Interestingly, Marcel visited Japan and was moved to say: “In Japan, I learned that communion with nature was possible”. I think Taniguchi would say that seeking to restore our relationship with nature (and our own bodies) is the key to the healing our world needs.
My reaction and thoughts
I was left with many questions to ponder. What is the act of listening? Has a deep-seated scepticism about our nature meant that we always experience the world from a perspective of limitations until science permits us to admit other possibilities to our discourse?
All Japanese instruments display this higher frequency character. I pondered whether the instruments were deliberately developed to induce this effect.
In the case of biwa I thought about sawari. This is a term used to describe how the flat surfaces the strings touch against are shaped to cause overtones to sound more prominently. These surfaces are the tops of the frets and the toriguchi. The toriguchi corresponds to the nut on a violin or guitar.
Fumon always shaped these surfaces on his instruments, although players often visit Ishida’s biwa shop in Toranomon to have it done in many cases.
Jinyoko
It was now my time to perform. I played into the microphone first to let the audience see the frequency range of the biwa. As expected it was rich in the range of frequencies that can induce the hypersonic effect.
I then performed Jinyoko. The text of this work is a transliteration of a Chinese Tang Dynasty poem into Japanese by Ban Masaomi. The original Chinese poem, Pipa xing, was written by Bai Juyi. It has been quoted and referenced throughout the history of Japanese and Chinese literature.
Being autobiographical in nature, the year is sometime around 816.
The poet is in exile. Banished from the capital, he is having a parting glass with a friend who has come to visit. Lonely is this time they spend on a boat on the Yangtse river.
Their silence is interrupted suddenly when they hear the sound of a biwa being played. The playing is enthralling. They search out the musician and finds a woman playing in a boat on her own.
The poet and his friend invite the woman to join them. After much persuasion, she agrees and once safely in the poet's boat, she plays once more. The poet describes the playing....
大絃は嘈々として 村雨の如く小絃は 切々として私語に似たり 切々と嘈々とこきまぜて弾けば大珠小珠玉盤に落つ 間関たる鶯の聲 花陰になめらかに 幽かに咽ぶ泉の流れは 氷の下に難むがごとし 水の泉は冷やかに渋りて絃を絶え
The thickest string rattles and drones like rain falling swiftly heavy then soft again now heavy and soft once more, the thinnest string whispers as though sharing intimate secrets. Soft and loud the strings whisper, ring, rattle and drone sounding like pearls of so many different sizes dropped on a plate of jade. The smooth cry of the bush warbler under a tree in blossom, the barely perceptible gurgle of a stream finding its way under the ice, cold spring water. The playing came to a still and the strings fell silent.... (translation TCM)
Then, asking why she is in this place so far from any cultural milieu, she responds by telling her life story.
She was born in the capital and in her youth she was famous there for her playing and beauty. However, as she aged, her fans lost interest in her. In the end she had no choice but to marry a merchant who never is at home.
Now she spends the cold evenings under the moon playing the biwa. The poet is deeply moved by her story. Her story and his seem so similar. For the first time he feels the pain of exile.
Taniguchi was delighted with this choice of piece. He felt the descriptive passage of the sound of the biwa fitted perfectly with the occasion.
Enokida made a recording of the performance. You can find it here.
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