Story
My way into understanding the worldwas through sound and minerals.
Looking back, I think I have always been trying to sense
the “something” that lies beneath what is in front of me.
When I hear a sound, I follow the resonance behind it.
When I meet a person or a thing, I am drawn to the character and possibility within.
Sensing what has not yet become words,
and coming to understand it in my own way.
At the root of that sense, there was sound.
Born and raised in Hamamatsu, a city of music,
I think the piano, which was by my side from the age of three,
was my first way into knowing the world.
When I heard a performance once,
it was not just the melody that stayed with me.
The dynamics, the timing of the pauses, the slightest sway,
even the personality and habits of the performer—all of it remained as one whole.
And then I would reproduce it, exactly as it was, on the piano.
If the performance I was learning from differed from the score,
I was the kind of child who would play even those differences just as I had heard them.
Looking back now,
I think rather than “memorizing” sound,
I was receiving the information within sound, structure and all.
Pitch.
Intensity.
Time.
The distance between sounds.
Their layering.
And the subtle nuances that change with each performer.
Receiving information before it becomes words,
and understanding the whole through the relationships within it.
This sense would later
expand the fields I express myself in—
to design, to minerals, and back again to sound.
