AFC Workshop @ Yamaha Ginza Studio

It was a great honor to plan, prepare, and participate in this wonderful workshop at Japan. In 2018, Dr. Kim talked about a new collaborative research with Yamaha Spatial Acoustic Design Team (lead by Mr. Miyazaki Hideo). At that time, the both parties (Yamaha and RIT) focused on how to utilize the AFC (Yamaha Active Field Control) system for music and multimedia production/creation contents, and strategically expand it to artists.

Dr. Kim proposed to create a completely new piece of music, only for this AFC system and contacted a renown composer, SiHyun Uhm, who was at Eastman School of Music (currently at the Juilliard School). SiHyun (Sia) wrote a wonderful piece of music that uses the AFC system as a core component to express her musical ideas and creativities.

For this project, Yamaha sent a prototype AFC system to RIT and Sia (SiHyun tested her music and modified according to the system features.
Yesterday, Yamaha organized an exclusive event (invitation only) in which Sia’s wonderful piece of String Quartet #2 for AFC system was performed first time. Since the piece was composed to promote the AFC system, the event was not named as “CONCERT,” yet more like a “WORKSHOP.” However, everyone came for this new music piece, the main presentation of the event.

Dr. Kim flew from RIT to serve as the technical director of this event. Since he planned this event from the beginning, he is the one who knows the piece more than any one (except the composer, Sia, of course).
Sia also came to Japan to assist musicians/performers in explaining the intended musical expressions and intonation of her piece.

RIT students who currently visited/returned/stayed in Japan also came to the event as staff to help Dr. Kim. Specifically, Xuan Lu worked a lot on this project and generated a demo version of the song using a MIDI virtual instrument software (Spitfire Solo Strings). Fortunately, Xuan was in Japan at that time, and was able to join this project as a crew.

Concert-prep was a real pain in the butt. Frankly musicians were not prepared well for the piece, which requires a lot of fingering techniques for a modern music. But they were very sincere and worked hard to make the music into a concrete and solid piece. In the concert, the team RIT (figure above) was in charge of 3D sound effects and AFC scene change. Sia (the composer) annotated in the score which AFC scene should be used. After a long discussion and trial-and-error with the AFC system at RIT, Sia made four scenes that helped her to fortify and enhance her musical ideas in the piece. For example, after the post-performance interview (figure below), she explained that she imagined two contrasting images in the piece: mountain and dessert. A basic frame of this music is to differentiate speed of music: slow – mountain and fast – dessert. Yet, just expressing ‘mountain’ only with tempo and musical notes. The AFC system then gave a new idea to add extra musical ideas in a space; sometimes using different patterns of reverberations and other times using spatial 3D sound effects.

This is a wonderful experience how an engineering system can be used for musical expression and creation. After the concert/workshop, a senior engineer from NHK and old buddy of Dr. Kim came and share his opinion and feedback.

Thank you for the interesting demonstration ! … It was great ! And I was very impressed you controlled sound effects and also the AFC settings during the performance. You are the part of the music ! It seems tough that sound engineer control not only reproduction systems but also musical components such as reverberation and sound effects… But I think it is some brand new style in immersive audio world !! I am looking forward to seeing you again ! Let’s talk about new immersive audio and performance using it !

(Hiroyuki Okubo)

Musicians also appreciated how the music was well blended with acoustics and sound effects.