Like John Cage's inclination to define a territory and use all of the
sounds within that territory as the sound material for a composition,
sound artist Atau Tanaka has selected such soundscapes as cyberspace and
the human body for his work. And like Cage's sonic structures that
convey a sense of adventure, Tanaka invites the Internet and muscle
movements into his compositions to add spontanaiety within form.

Tanaka studied electronic music at Harvard, "in the era of analog," when
he had the good fortune of attending lectures by John Cage, who
according to Tanaka was one of the first musicians to have a strong
conceptual approach. For instance, "He made contact with the visual art
world," says Tanaka, whose musical style is likewise interdiscplinary.

Which is why he recently participated in Rotterdam's fifth bi-annual
Dutch Electronic Arts Festival (DEAF_00). Tanaka spoke about music in
time and space at an interdisciplinary symposium and launched his Global
String installation, in cooperation with the Ars Electronica Center in
Linz, Austria. For the latter, Tanaka designed a virtual string that
stretched from Rotterdam to Linz. Within the physical spaces of each
city was an elongated steel wire and big screen videoconferencing
system. In between: conceptual space (aka cyberspace), whose Internet
traffic caused the string end-points to resonate.

Tanaka is an Artist Ambassador to Apple Computer France for new
technology and speaks about the current "PowerBook music movement,"
which allows sound artists using computer systems to become increasingly
mobile. Tanaka, for instance, spends six months out of every year away
from his Tokyo home, and says, "I can now take my electronic instruments
into different contexts, as a saxophonist can take the saxophone to a
jazz club or big concert hall or the street. Digital technology has
allowed me the same sort of flexibility."

Tanaka visits Toronto November 24 to perform his Corporeal at the Glenn
Gould Studio, which is part of the Digitized Bodies - Virtual Spectacles
project (http://www.digibodies.org) curated by Nina Czegledy, presented
by InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Center, and supported by the Japan
Foundation (in Canada and Tokyo) and The Daniel Langlois Foundation for
Art, Science, and Technology (Montreal).

"Digitized Bodies has to do with bodies in this digital era," starts
Tanaka, "and that's another concept I've been working with in the field
of music." In his Toronto performance, his own gestures will cue sound
and image processing with a neural musical instrument controller called
Biomuse.

Tanaka has been performing with the Biomuse since 1992, during his
graduate work in computer music at Stanford's CCRMA (Center for Computer
Research in Music and Acoustics). An invention of medical researchers,
the Biomuse was designed to pick up EMG and EEG signals from "sticky
electrodes on the skin" and turn them into MIDI signals - "signals to
control digital synthesizers," explains Tanaka, who later went on to
study at IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique
Musique) in Paris.

Tanaka based himself out of France for five years before leaving for
STEIM in Amsterdam, where he endeavoured to build interactive and
gestural instruments. It was here also that the Sensorband group was
born - Tanaka (on Biomuse), with Edwin van der Heide (on infrared
sensors) and Zbigniew Karkowski (on MIDI conductors).

Sensor instruments became a family of instruments for Tanaka and his
band mates, like string instruments or brass instruments. "Each of them
was different but united," says Tanaka, "in the way they took corporeal
gestures and turned them into musical signals."

Tanaka is admittedly tired after a Biomuse performance. It is physical
in a "corporeal" sense, in the absence of physical objects. "The way to
get an interesting articulation or expressivity out of the instrument is
in a very, very physical way, which becomes internalized."

Those in attendance will see Tanaka clenching his fists or shaping
things with his hands, as if molding clay, "but there is no clay. I'm
not holding on to anything. The muscle gestures are evocative of that
action and give me interesting muscle tension trajectories to work with."

Tanaka's style is not to purposely recreate everyday actions. He's more
interested in the intuitive process that emerges during a performance.
"It's a process of discovery," he says, about the responses from and
interplay between the Biomuse and his body.

Tanaka will also be using a system that derives image synthesis in real
time, dealing partly with the investigation of the relationship between
sound and image, whereby a similar gesture controls the sound and also
the image processing. Tanaka uses an external synthesizer for the sound
and a second computer to run an early version of Videodelic (a real-time
video art synthesizer designed by a friend of Tanaka's, from Paris) that
will generate abstract colours in motion.

"The possibilities - as we often say with technology - are limitless,"
admits Tanaka. "But in the end I prefer not to do everything. I try to
find a kind of language for the instrument. I'm interested in the upper
body movements of a musician - to explore what the gestures mean in a
pure musical way, in the absence of the instrument."