Tanori-on

Tanori-on

Taenori-on ( Japanese 手 乗 り 音 ) is an electronic musical instrument created by Japanese artist Toshio Iwai ( 岩 井 俊雄 ) and Yu Nishibori ( 西 堀 ユ ウ ) from Yamaha ’s Music and Human Interface Group, a development center Sound Technology (Yamaha Center for Advanced Sound Technology). The instrument consists of a palm screen with a grid of 16 × 16 LED switches, each of which can be activated in various ways to create a musical evolving sound pattern . LED switches are placed inside the magnesium housing, which has two built-in speakers located on the upper edge of the housing, as well as buttons that control the type of sound and the number of beats per minute . At the bottom of the instrument is the LCD screen. Using the communication function, you can play synchronized sessions, as well as exchange songs between two devices.

Taunori-on was demonstrated at the SIGGRAPH- 2005 conference, held in Los Angeles in August 2005 . A detailed discussion of the project took place at a presentation held at the NIME- 2006 conference in Paris in June 2006 .

Toshio Iwai used theoroni on live performances (such as Sónar in Barcelona in June 2006 , and Futuresonic in Manchester in July 2006 ; in particular at the Futuresonic concert during the show, there was good feedback from the audience and this was one of the most important impetus for making tanori-on a real commercial product). The instrument was launched in London on September 4, 2007 at a retail price of $ 1,200. To promote the instrument, three renowned electronic experimental musicians - Jim O'Rourke , Atom Heart , and Robert Lippok - were invited to compose a demo -tracks for recording which theoroni-on was used. These tracks were posted on the Tanori-on website as demos in MP3 format ^[1] .

Iwai’s intentions for creating theorini was to create a beautiful electronic instrument. In his own words:

In the past, a musical instrument had to have beauty, both of form and sound, and had to fit the player almost organically. [...] Modern electronic instruments do not have this inevitable relationship between form, sound, and player. What I did is an attempt to return these [...] elements and combine them in a true musical instrument of the digital age.

The tool builds on Iwaii’s previous work, the Electroplankton game developed for the Nintendo DS , where a mixture of sound and light was used as aesthetic interface elements.

The world tour, representing theorini-on, began in Frankfurt on March 12 and ended in Tokyo on April 25, 2008 . Among the artists involved in the tour were Jim O'Rourke , Atom Heart , To Rococo Rot , Pole , Robert Lippok , Sutekh , I Am Robot and Proud and Nathan Michel .