- Yasunao Tone
Yasunao Tone is a
Japan ese artist that has worked with many different types of media throughout his career. He was born inTokyo , Japan in 1935, and he graduated from Chiba Japanese National University in 1957, majoring in Japanese literature. He became active in the Fluxus movement in the 1960s and moved to the United States in 1972. Fact|date=May 2008Yasunao Tone is known mostly for his musical work, much of which relies on unconventional techniques. Tone began manipulating
compact disks to achieve uniquely mangled sounds in the early 1980s. cite book | last = Cox | first = Christoph | coauthors = Daniel Warner | title = Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music | publisher = Continuum International Publishing Group | date = 2006 | pages = pp. 341-347 | isbn = 0-8264-1614-4] For his 1985 album, Solo for Wounded CD, he damaged audio CDs and used the information that aCD player was able to extract from those discs to create new pieces. Tone doesn't make use of a traditional sampler, however though "de-controlling" the playback of the CD audio, his works consist of samples played back in an unexpected (almost random) order. Tone has stated that the error-correction functionality of modern CD players has made it hard to continue to use this technique and, for this reason, he continues to use older equipment. For his collaboration with Florian Hecker, Palimpsest, he converted Japanese Man'yōshū poems to sound. Fact|date=May 2008Always active in
United States withavant-garde music artists, he has been awarded a CAPS Grant in multi-media, a New York State Council on the Arts commission grant for flutist Barbara Held, aNational Endowment for the Arts grant for collaborative work withBlondell Cummings andSenga Nengdi , and aNew York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in performance/emerging forms. Fact|date=May 2008References
See also
"Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language". Ed. Brandon LaBelle (Los Angeles/Copenhagen: Errant Bodies Press, 2007). ISBN 0965557081.
"Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art" by Brandon LaBelle (Continuum: New York, 2006), pp. 35-36, 39, 43, 45, 72, 153, 200, 218, 220-24, 241.
"The Fluxus Reader" ed. Ken Friedman (John Wiley and Sons: New York, 1998).
Caleb Stuart "Yasunao Tone's Wounded and Skipping Compact Discs: From Improvisation and Indeterminate Composition to Glitching CDs," Leonardo Electronic Almanac" vol.10, no. 9, September 2002.
External links
* [http://www.lovely.com/bios/tone.html Yasunao Tone Biography]
* [http://www.ubu.com/sound/flux_tellus.html UBU Web Fluxus page with a MP3 of a piece by Yasunao Tone]
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