47. Reportage of a UPISketch Workshop in Japan

The Meta-Xenakis Japan Team held two UPISketch workshops in 2022. These contributed to disseminate Xenakis’s concept of the UPIC system to young Japanese musicians as well as to people who are not accustomed to contemporary music. Beforehand, in 2021, in collaboration with Rodolphe Bourotte (brainchild behind the UPISketch), one composition class, in which every student created a short piece using this application, had been realized at Nagoya City University. After the class, some students presented their pieces to the other students. Three of the students’ pieces were broadcast via YouTube in the online concert Nagoya Electronic Concerts 2021(NEMC2021). In the first workshop in 2022, twelve participants presented their pieces based on UPISketch. All the participants were university students studying media art and design. After the presentation of their pieces, they discussed how to manage a workshop for more general public having no experience in digital music. They made UPISketch user-manual texts in Japanese based on the UPISketch URL. This reportage presented here covers our second UPISketch workshop which was held on May 29, 2022, celebrating Xenakis’s 100th birthday. It was open to high school students and others interested in music as one type of contemporary media art. The workshop comprised an initiation to the application, free time for the participants’ creation, and evaluation of the pieces by some of the young composers. Participants were neither professional musicians nor sound designers, but all enjoyed drawing sound.