Three-Dimensional Music
Cornelius’s Animated Soundworlds
Nintendo GameBoy Advance: “bit Generations: Coloris,” 2006. Sound design by Cornelius [Keigo Oyamada]
Preamble
Recent scholarship on contemporary electronic music genres, from electronic dance music (EDM) to micromusic, has suggested that the analysis of such musics needs to move beyond categories of musicological analysis that were developed in relation to classical and modernist music—harmony, cadences, counterpoint, scale, serialism, and so on—since so much of what characterizes electronic music and its aesthetics simply does not make sense in terms of conventional categories of musicological analysis. Instead, scholars such as Joanna Demers and Mandy Suzanne-Wong have proposed an analytical methodology that draws on the acousmatic theory of Pierre Schaeffer and the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in the 1950s. Centered on what he called the objet sonore, or sound object, Schaeffer advocated a mode of listening that seeks to focus attention and analysis purely on the acoustic properties of a sound itself, irrespective of its source. This was the basis for his tape-manipulation experiments with Pierre Henry and others that would become known as musique concrète. Schaeffer went on to develop an elaborate taxonomy of such sounds and their timbres and textures, a project that has been the subject of renewed interest in recent decades thanks to the support of sound theorist Michel Chion.
Joanna Demers, Listening Through The Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Mandy-Suzanne Wong, “Listening to EDM: Sound Object Analysis and Vital Materialism,” Volume!, 10 (1): 193-211.
Pierre Schaeffer, Traité des objects musicaux: Essai interdisciplines (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966).
Michel Chion, Guide des objets sonores: Pierre Schaeffer et la recherche musicale (Paris: Éditions Buchet/Chastel, 1983).
Anyone familiar with the music of Keigo Oyamada—better known under the name of his Planet of the Apes alter ego, Cornelius—is likely to point out that his stylistic range is hardly limited to electronic music, extending across the spectrum from speed metal to bossa nova; but I would like to suggest that his music provides a particularly interesting case study for what we might call a sound-object oriented approach, not least because it has itself been increasingly organized around the construction and interplay of sound objects, whose often idiosyncratic sound envelopes are key components of his musical aesthetics, from a theremin to a Roland Space Echo delay.
Entry Point
In a guest entry for the Memories of Shibuya blog, a forum for nostalgic evocations of the Shibuya-kei style, Nick Currie (aka Momus) begins by describing 3D Corporation, the jimusho in Nakameguro where artists such as Cornelius and Kahimi Karie worked at the time:
The top floor contained a tiny but funky recording studio crammed with Cornelius’s gadgets and trinkets: Moog synths, Maestro drum machines, guitars, a Mac, airbells, a minuscule padded live room. On one side there were views down to the cherry-lined Meguro River, on the other loomed the skyscrapers and flyovers of Shibuya. When Cornelius advertised his Point album with the slogan “From Nakameguro to everywhere,” this room was the “point” in question, the place where, day by day, the three-dimensional music got made. [My emphasis]
Momus [Nick Currie], “Artist Spotlight: Kahimi Karie (week two)” (Memories of Shibuya, 10 January 2015).
The description of Keigo Oyamada’s music as three-dimensional here is intriguing, but not just in terms of its relevance to his three albums as Cornelius up to Fantasma. The idea that I want to explore here, indeed, is that the concept of three-dimensional music provides a useful way of understanding the musical trajectory that Oyamada began with Fantasma, and that has continued up to the present in his most recent work. Looking back over the past two decades, as I will try to suggest here, the name of 3D Corporation seems eerily appropriate, even prophetic. But to understand this point, we need to begin with animation.
Animated Music
Animation is a key element in Oyamada’s audiovisual aesthetics. While composing his 1997 album Fantasma he visited Disneyland in Anaheim, and has said that the album was in part inspired by the “It’s A Small World” ride. Fantasma references Disney in several places—we could start with the similarities between Fantasma and Fantasia—but Disney is by no means the only form of animation referenced on the album: one of its most remarkable tracks is built around a sample of the theme music to a 1950s home stereo demo disk featuring the cartoon character Mr. Magoo; the same track also includes a sample of a late-1950s tune by the creator of the Chipmunks, the pitch-shifted rodents who pioneered the 1960s tape manipulation craze.
Reviewers of Fantasma picked up on the album’s cartoonish quality, including its Roadrunner tempos, abrupt changes of direction, and collage aesthetics. In this respect, Fantasma has much in common with the 1930s compositions of bandleader and, later, electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott, that were repurposed by Carl Stalling for Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons. In my book on Fantasma, I argue that the album in its entirety can be seen as a work of sonic animation, in which binaurally recorded sounds, from a popping soda can to a buzzing fly to cartoon soundtracks themselves, are animated in a stereophonic spectacular prefigured by Disney’s own historical landmark in surround sound, Fantasia. Fantasma, I suggest can be seen as a musical counterpart of Tokyo Disneyland, a Japanese adaptation of the Magic Kingdom whose songs are reminiscent of the spectacular vehicles of its famous Electrical Parade.
Martin Roberts, Cornelius’s Fantasma (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019).
Sound Objects
If Fantasma’s dazzling parade of samples and musical references remind us that it’s a small world, after all, the album proved to be a pivotal moment in Oyamada’s musical career. With his next album, Point (2000), to the disappointment of some, his music began to move in a more abstract direction, a trajectory that would continue with the album that followed it, Sensuous (2006). The transition that begins with Fantasma first involves a move away from what I call a referential music based on sampling, collage, and stylistic pastiche, which also characterized Oyamada’s first two albums as Cornelius, towards a more minimalist, non-referential music as a world of animated sound objects—a “magic kingdom” all of its own.
I should make it clear that I’m not using either the term “non-referential” or “sound object” in Pierre Schaeffer’s sense of the term. To describe the music on Fantasma as “referential” is to say that almost its every detail, including non-musical elements, are a quotation of some sort that invites us to try to identify what it points to. The most obvious form of such reference would be the sampling of historical sound sources, or stylistic pastiche, but it also includes non-musical elements such as most of the album’s song titles (“Star Fruits Surf Rider” to “God Only Knows”), and its psychedelia-inspired artwork. Indeed, the album becomes increasingly self-referential as it progresses, reiterating earlier motifs until its penultimate track, “Thank You For The Music,” which is more or less a medley of the album itself up to that point.
What we also hear on Fantasma, however, are the beginnings of a new preoccupation with sounds not heard on the preceding albums but which comes to the fore in subsequent ones, with both musical and non-musical sounds, which became the basis for a distinctive sound library utilized on many of Oyamada’s subsequent projects. These sounds are non-referential, not in Schaeffer’s sense that the source itself remains unidentifiable, but that they are not referencing an existing musical source—the way, for example, the whistled motif at the beginning of the album references the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, or the melody of “2010” references Bach’s Fugue in G Minor. In Oyamada’s soundworld, we may identify a sound as coming from a musical instrument, whether a guitar, an electric piano, or an autoharp, but the loop or hit in question exists independently of any specific musical referent. From Point onwards, these sound objects, and the animated interplay between them, become the building-blocks of Oyamada’s soundworld.
The constant running from Fantasma to Point and beyond is animation; but whereas animation in Fantasma is primarily another kind of reference (Fantasia, Mr. Magoo), from Point onwards the emphasis shifts towards animation as a musical practice. In the albums following Fantasma, Oyamada’s music becomes increasingly modular, often recalling the drifting structure of a mobile. What is interesting about Oyamada’s interest in animation is that it is not limited to musical objects but expands into the visual realm, and the creation of animated audiovisual works that explore the interplay between music and motion graphics, sound and visual objects.
Both Point and Sensuous were released not just on CD as albums in the traditional sense, but also on DVD as collections which are not simply “music videos” in the sense of serving a promotional purpose secondary to the songs themselves, but audiovisual works in their own right, in which the music becomes a soundtrack synchronized with animated motion graphics. Oyamada’s longstanding collaboration with visual artist Koichiro Tsujikawa is thus not just a matter of producing music videos but the co-creation of a new kind of digital visual music in which musical and graphic animation become mutually metaphorical counterparts. In one video, for example, “Like a Rolling Stone,” (a reference to Bob Dylan’s famous song), a rolling, reverberating sound object reminiscent of musique concrète finds a visual counterpart in a pebble that metaphormoses into a complex landscape of animated circling toy figures.
Synchronicity
Two closely related elements of this new audiovisual aesthetic are sequencing and synchronization: the seamless timing of audio and video, musical and visual sequences, so that audiovisual space and the sonic and graphic objects that animate it are experienced as one and the same thing. This synchronization of visual narrative and musical soundtrack is one of the hallmarks of animation, originating in Walt Disney’s earliest sound cartoons of the late 1920s and perfected in Fantasia, in a technique that has become known as “Mickey Mousing.” This audiovisual synchronization is today a routine practice in the studio, of course, where multi-track sequencing has made it simply a matter of dragging audio and video clips around along parallel timelines; but reproducing it in a live performance presents a much more daunting challenge. Beginning with Point and continuing with Sensuous, however, Oyamada took up this challenge, with his band performing songs in perfect synchronization with Tsujikawa’s visuals. Such synchronized performances have remained the basis of Oyamada’s live shows up to the recent tours for his latest album, Mellow Waves.
While the synchronization of music and image is certainly a tour de force in terms of performance, however, it does have certain limitations, not least in its exclusion of what is arguably one of the most pleasurable elements of live musical performance: its spontaneity and capacity for the unexpected, whether in the form of extended solos, improvisations, or just banter with the audience. In Oyamada’s Cornelius shows, what you saw in the video is what you get: just as in an animated movie, everything is meticulously sequenced and nothing is left to chance. This can arguably lend his live shows a certain robotic quality reminiscent of Kraftwerk, Devo, and YMO’s parodically robotic performances—–a style that Oyamada is clearly happy to invoke, but which can at times make his live shows feel a bit overquantized.
Beginning with Point, then, Oyamada moves increasingly towards a multimodal conception of music as the interplay between animated sound objects within a three-dimensional space, and the visualization of this process in the animated visual objects of motion graphics. Given this interest in the correspondences between sonic and visual animation, it was perhaps inevitable that his trajectory would lead to producing soundtracks for animated movies. His soundtrack for the most recent iteration of the Ghost in the Shell series, GITS: ARISE, represents the most developed example to date of the sound-object approach. The sets of musical cues that comprise the bulk of the two CDs of the soundtracks for the ARISE series and the New Movie theatrical release are not structured in a linear way (in contrast to the linear structure of Fantasma), but instead function as modules that can be dragged and dropped onto different animated sequences as needed: most are instrumental loops whose length can be extended or shortened as required, while many are built around a simple repeating arpeggiated chord sequence.
Much the same can be said of the cues used for Oyamada’s soundtrack to the NHK children’s TV show, Design Ah!—a show which is itself organized around digital animations of everyday objects, in a kind of ballet numérique.
Audio Architecture
In the videos that we have looked at, the relation between musical and graphic objects is metaphorical: that is, other than their synchronization and dynamic qualities, there is no necessary correspondence between them. The graphic objects themselves are not sources of the sounds we hear. Musical sounds are like splashes of paint across a moving timeline, but that is all.
But what if the relation between animated musical and graphical objects was more literal? Perhaps it might look something like Keita Onishi’s digital video Forest & Trees.
Oyamada’s collaboration with Onishi Keita in the Audio Architecture exhibition in 2018 represents another example of the increasing interchangeability of sonic and visual objects, digital music and motion graphics.
Cornelius, “Audio Architecture” (2018). Visuals: Onishi Keita.
Here as in earlier Cornelius videos, musical and graphic objects are figured as synchronized events along the moving timeline of a sequencer, but with one important difference: rather than simply observing the sequence on a two-dimensional screen, the video unfolds in a virtual space in which animated sound objects take the form of three-dimensional graphic objects; watching the video with headphones to experience its three-dimensional surround sound, it is easy to feel as if we had somehow been placed inside a virtual sequencer.
The music video itself was the basis for a variety of experiments in three-dimensional music: at the Audio Architecture exhibition itself it was projected onto a wall of the exhibition space in surround sound, with visitors seated on the floor to watch it; the band also performed a synchronized version of the song with the video projection-mapped onto them, both live and in the studio.
Oyamada has been interested in immersive sound environments since Fantasma’s binaural stereo was optimized for headphone listening, while subsequent albums were released in 5.1 surround sound. But it is only more recently that digital video technologies have made immersive audiovisual environments a reality.
These are currently developing in at least three directions:
- Fully-immersive VR environments in which the user wears a head-mounted visual display and headphones;
- Installations, in which the audience enters a real three-dimensional space and experiences ambisonic audio and projection-mapped video;
- Augmented-reality (AR) and Mixed-reality (MR) experiences, a hybrid of the first two categories in which 3D digital objects are mapped onto real-world environments with a headset (the Magic Leap) or on the screen of a mobile phone or tablet.
At the Audio Architecture show, which emphasized large-screen projection, it became possible to walk around inside a Cornelius music video. But as far as I know, it is currently the third, AR/MR kind of immersive experience that Oyamada is currently exploring, and which seems likely to bring a new dimension to his future experiments with musical objects. Kitasenji, the design studio of his longtime collaborator Koichiro Tsujikawa, has recently been doing the same in its animated visuals for De De Mouse.
Cosmic Voyage
The YouTube release in July 2024 of Cornelius’s music video “Mind Train” to promote a forthcoming 12-inch single release marks the latest installment in Oyamada’s exploration of digital visual music Produced by Keita Onishi, the 9-minute music video is the most fully-realized example of Oyamada’s exploration of the interplay between sound and visual objects, music and motion graphics.
A black-and-white motion graphics video that continues the monochromatic aesthetic that has characterized Oyamada’s work since Mellow Waves (2017), the video at first sight looks like a music visualizer, or the “cosmic zooms” of fractal movies inspired by early computer art. It begins as a POV shot from a train speeding along an endless track through a virtual landscape. The track serves as a visual metaphor for the musical track, with the onrushing POV as a playhead that triggers musical objects like MIDI notes along the timeline of a DAW: floating orbs, a flock of seagulls, geometric shapes. The train/playhead then plunges into a kind of neural network that seems to simulate consciousness itself, with text-objects appearing as the corresponding words are sung on the audio track (remain … memory … brain … memory … again again again again again). A guitar solo is visualized by a corridor of pulsating strings reminiscent of the “meet the soundtrack” sequence in Fantasia, after which the musical soundworld appears to disintegrate as we emerge into a hyperspace of floating musical objects, eventually reaching a planet/trackball where the playback momentarily pauses. In the video’s most fascinating sequence, a comet, meteorites, clusters of satellites, and rings visualize musical patterns and motifs against an ethereal audiovisual space. The three-dimensional objects here recall those of animated computer art, but their dynamic movement generates corresponding musical patterns: squiggly lines make squiggly music (or vice versa). The next section most closely resembles the algorithmic music visualizers of contemporary electronic music, before we return to the virtual train and the video concludes in rhythmic abstraction.
In its seamless synchronization of animated objects and musical cues, “Mind Train” exemplifies what Steven Shaviro calls the rhythm image, a contemporary form of audiovisual media that he argues has superseded the twentieth-century movement-image and the time-image theorized by Gilles Deleuze. One of Shaviro’s primary examples of the rhythm image also involves a train: Michel Gondry’s music video for The Chemical Brothers’ song “Star Guitar” (2002) depicts what appears to be a continuous shot from the window of a train, with the visual shapes of passing buildings and objects perfectly synchronized with the song’s beats and musical elements.
The Chemical Brothers, “Star Guitar” (Wikipedia). Visuals: Michel Gondry.
Steven Shaviro, The Rhythm Image: Music Videos and New Audiovisual Forms (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).
A closer antecedent for “Mind Train” are the music-based videogames produced by Toshio Iwai for Nintendo: Otocky (1987) for the Famicom, and Electroplankton (2005) for the DS. Both games depict motion-graphics soundworlds in which music is generated by interactive play with and between visual sound objects. Oyamada himself explored the interface between visual music and videogames in his soundtrack for the GameBoy Advance game Coloris (2005) (shown at the beginning of this paper). Whereas in classic videogames musical cues are synchronized with in-game events, most famously in Koji Kondo’s soundtrack for Super Mario Bros., the Nintendo games scored by Iwai and Oyamada take this a step further by making musical production the purpose of the gameplay itself. The game becomes a musical toy. By adding play to the equation of visual and sound objects, the games transform visual music into an interactive, generative process.
Iwai is best known as the creator of the Tenori-on, a tone-matrix electronic music sequencer that became a cult instrument in the late 1990s. On these games, see my paper “Platformers and Sequencers: Playing with MIDI” (Ludomusicology conference, University of Utrecht, 2015.)
Oceanic Waves
Cornelius, “Surfing on Mind Wave pt 2.” Visuals: Koichiro Tsujikawa.
Perhaps the most remarkable example of Oyamada’s visual music to date is the video produced by Koichiro Tsujikawa for the track “Surfing on Mind Wave pt 2,” from his album Mellow Waves (2017). Monochrome and almost completely abstract, the video opens in silence with a grey POV shot moving over the ocean towards a low, hazy sun centered in the frame. Almost immediately, a sustained string chord triggers the video’s main visual trope, the spiralling tube of a giant wave seen in a GoPro-style camera view by a surfer moving through it (the tip of a surfboard intermittently appears at the bottom of the shot). The sustained string chord remains unresolved for the duration of the track, streteched into a drone and modulated by new harmonic layers and electronic sound effects. Sound and image are mutually responsive: a phrase of scattered electronic notes emerges as water droplets fly across the screen; sonic and visual glitches or splashes seamlessly reproduce one another so that sound and image become indistinguishable. As sampled voices and laughter are heard, speaking and smiling mouths briefly fade into view. Towards the midpoint, as the string drone begins to strobe, the wave becomes a tunnel-like vortex whirling around the sun, only to recede and open onto a sky of seagulls wheeling overhead, their cries reproduced on the soundtrack. As they transition into the cries of a children’s playground, the ghostly silhouettes of children swim briefly into view. Throughout, the sun remains centered in the frame like a gyroscope, as the wave swirls around it over filtered, strobing electronic sounds. Appropriately, the last sample is of waves themselves, mingled with the cries of the seagulls, as sound and image coalesce and fade, returning us to the initial silence above a calm ocean.
With this video, the trajectory of Oyamada’s music becomes clear: the oceanic, a fully immersive experience in which the mind dissolves into the world around it. The wave has become an increasingly prominent motif in his work since at least Mellow Waves, in all its senses: sound waves, ocean waves, the brain waves of the mind itself. This interest in the immersive lends him much in common with his compatriot artist, Ryoji Ikeda; but whereas Ikeda is primarily interested in data and his work seeks to immerse us in the hyperspace of datascapes, Oyamada is interested in altered states of consciousness and the synesthetic correspondences between sensory experiences. Whereas Ikeda’s immersive spaces are data-driven, Oyamada’s are psychedelic: it is about opening the mind to new forms of oceanic consciousness of the world through audiovisual experiences. We would expect nothing less from the creator of an album so inflected by psychedelia: Fantasma.
