Saturday 1 March 2014

Toshiya Tsunoda



For the past 15 years Toshiya Tsunoda has been creating acoustic works, he is renown
for attention to detail and individual style of sound that he creates.. Followers of his 
work say that Tsunoda ‘seems to hear like no one else’.  He is Currently working in 
Yokohama, Japan however he originally studied at Tokyo’s National University of Fine 
Art and Music. During his time in Tokyo studying Tsunoda developed a background 
in fine art and more specifically in oil painting.

When developing a field recording, Tsunoda constantly considers the listener and what 
his audience will make of the recording. He aims to create works that are ‘like meeting 
a familiar friend’. He wants to recreate the experience of landscape like a photo can but he
 does it through sound. This is particularly important to Tsunoda as it means each member 
of an audience has a individual experience of his work. It evokes different memories and 
emotions for each listener. The audience is so important in creating work Tsunoda even 
considers the listeners to ‘become part of the subject matter of the artwork’



As well as recreating landscapes through sound Tsunoda is also interested in revealing 
sounds that would otherwise go unnoticed. He use multiple extremely sensitive 
microphones all placed through out a space to capture the sounds that we normally 
miss, he also captures sound by using stethoscopes and vibrations. Some of the more 
interesting and unexpected sound that Tsunoda has captured include: the sound of air in a 
glass bottle as well as electromagnetic interference. Before I started looking in to sound 
art I had no idea that air in a bottle made a sound? Tsunoda is passionate about finding a 
seemingly mundane space or object and highlighting all the interesting sounds that can
be produced. 

Tsunoda produced The Temple Recording during January 2013. The work originated 
from a field recording taken at Minamishitaura, Miura city Kanagawa, Japan. In 
total the piece is 16:52 min. while listening to this I begin to understand what Tsunoda
meant by his work seeming like a ‘familiar friend’ The sounds are very universal, its highly 
likely that each listener would have heard something similar before. This is a 
really important aspect of the work, it gives it a whole new dimension as you start to 
associate these sounds your hearing with a memory that familiars. As a listener we 
are constantly trying to identify a sound and put it in a category, we are constantly trying 
to justify and make sense of these sometimes very abstract sounds. This on one hand 
is beneficial as it gives us a more personal connection to the work. However as we
are constantly analysing what we are hearing and trying to justify it, 
perhaps we are miss some of what the artist has created.




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