Tenori-On (en BcnWeek)

(published in BCNWeek Magazine, Barcelona, June 2006)

This has nothing to do with an opera tenor, or the archetype of the mujeriego, Don Juan. Dios me libre. Tenori-on is a machine created by Toshio Iwai, a Japanese shy guy that has visited our country severaltimes during the last decade — the last time was in September 2005 during the ArtFutura Festival. Now he is coming back to Sonar to introduce us to this incredible apparatus that combines a la perfección the creation of image and sound.

The Tenori-on could be an invention for videogame frikis, regarding Iwai’s past involvement in this industry. But the Tenori-on is much more than this. It is a novel digital instrument for playing sound and ambient light patterns that is operated by touching 16x16 LED switches. You could think of them as musical keyboards that respond to the subtlety of your finger touch by emitting light waves, creating afterglow, and making soothing sound sequences. Also, multiple Tenori-Ons can be networked together, creating Tenori-On orchestras. The philosophy behind it seems as lucid as its development: “A violin doesn’t work if any of its beautiful shape, sound quality, and usability is missing. However, electronic musical instruments often failto create this inevitable relation of shape, sound, and usability. My goalwith Tenori-On is to make it the right instrument for the real digital age by rethinking what musical instruments should be.”

Listening to him, his work sounds as if it was something normal, easy. At the end of the conversation, you realize that you are nodding like a tonta, completely convinced of the simplicity of everything. But immediately after that, the Tenorion in your hands, and Toshio authorizes you with a smile; “go ahead,play it”. You are frightened of breaking the mysterious instrument or, even worse, start playing it in a horse-with-a-piano style. Finally, your astonished air makes him laugh, and with the patience of a maestro he starts explaining the way the Tenori-on works while the improvised sounds start arising as if it was a studied musical composition. Now is when you understand:“Ok, Toshio, you’re right. Coming from you, everything can be that easy”.