Editing Yasunao Tone (section)

== Activity in the United States (1972–2025) ==
In 1972, Tone went to [[Mills College]] in [[Oakland, California]] to perform at the event “Repetition and Structure: Works of Yasunao Tone 1961-1964.”<ref name=":0" /> What Tone had intended as a trip away from Tokyo, stopping in France, the Bay Area of California, and New York, turned into a permanent residence when Tone decided to move to New York during that same trip.<ref>Dasha Dekleva, “In Parallel,” in ''Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language'' (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 39-54, 51.</ref><ref name=":0" /> 

He was soon asked by David Behrman, director of the [[Merce Cunningham Dance Company]], to do some composing for the following year’s season.<ref name=":0" /> Tone created a piece for a two-day [[Merce Cunningham|Cunningham]] event, ''Clockwork Video'' (1974), which used a pulley system to put in motion three turntables.<ref name=":0" /><ref>Dasha Dekleva, “In Parallel,” in ''Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language'' (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 39-54, 52.</ref> The first turned at a rate of one revolution per second, the second one per minute, and the last turntable one per hour.<ref name=":0" /> He then placed a video camera on the turn table to capture the interior of the [[Merce Cunningham|Cunningham]] Studio, which had a stage on one side and was mirrored on the other.<ref name=":0" /> By placing the turn tables by the mirrored side, the footage captures the real space about half of the time while capturing its reflection for the other half.<ref name=":0" /> The piece was accompanied by a text Tone wrote, compositing a [[Michel Foucault]] text on [[Gilles Deleuze]] and Tone’s own essay, “On Looking at Photography” (Shashin o miru koto ni tsuite).<ref name=":0" /> A later version of the piece captured a female nude body in three sections: head, torso, and legs.<ref name=":0" /> Projections of the respective sections rotated in intervals of one second, one minute and one hour, aligning at the completion of the hour.<ref name=":0" /> Tone titled the work ''Clockwork Video à la Magritte''.<ref name=":0" />

Another work prominently featured by [[Merce Cunningham Dance Company|Cunningham’s dance company]] was ''Geography and Music'', performed from 1979 to 1987.<ref name=":13">Dasha Dekleva, “In Parallel,” in ''Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language'' (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 39-54, 53.</ref> The work was commissioned by the American Dance Festival in Durham for [[Merce Cunningham|Cunningham]]’s ''Roadrunners''. The piece comprised a text, a notation for two amplified string instruments (derived from the tablature of ninth-century Chinese pipa music, and a gated audio system.<ref>Yasunao Tone and Judith Grossman, “Geography and Music: for Amplified String Music and Text,” ''Conjunctions'' 28 (1997): pp. 270-277, 272.</ref> The work features the reading of passages from a late 10th century Chinese encyclopedia, describing various foreign places and people.<ref name=":13" />

Around this time, Tone became influenced by the work of East Asian Studies Scholar Shizuoka Shirakawa and his 1970 book ''Kanji'' in particular.<ref name=":0" /> The book ethnographically traces the development of kanji characters.<ref name=":0" /> Inspired by [[Jacques Derrida]]’s ''Of Grammatology'', Tone began a process of translating [[kanji]] characters into sound.<ref name=":0" /> This would prove to be a rich avenue for Tone’s experimentation in sound seen in works like ''Musica Iconologos'' and ''Musica Simulacra. Musica Iconologos'' (1993) converted two poems from the [[Shih Ching]], China’s earliest poetic anthology, into sound.<ref name=":14">Federico Marulanda, “From Logogram to Noise,” in ''Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language'' (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 79-92, 82.</ref> Tone described the process for producing his album Musica Iconologos as such: “first, the material source of the piece was derived from the poetic text of ancient China and each character of the text was converted into photographic images according to the ancient form of the Chinese characters which are closer to images than the modern form. I scanned the images and digitized them, thus the images were transformed simply into 0’s and 1’s. Then, I obtained [[histograms]] from the [[binary codes]] and had the computer read the histograms as sound waves; thus I got sound from the images.”<ref>Hans Ulrich Obrist and Yasunao Tone, “Interview with Yasunao Tone,” in ''Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language'' (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 63-75, 72.</ref> For example, “Solar Eclipse in October,” a poem composed of 262 early Chinese characters was turned into half an hour of experimental, chance-driven sound.<ref name="tonebook82">Tone book 82</ref> A similar method was employed for ''Musica Simulacra'', debuted in 2003, which took the Man’yoshu collection of poems of the 7th and 8th centuries as its source material.<ref name="tonebook82" /> This particular project shows Tone’s multi-disciplinary concern in that it necessitated study of the obscure [[grammatology]] of the characters used (and sometimes invented) in the writing of the Man'yōshū anthology. With the original poem in mind, a relationship/pattern can be established between words and sound events. The repetition of a word is highlighted and traceable to an analogue waveform. Tone used these analog patterns, in addition to an artificial three-part structures, in 'Musica Iconologs' to reduce the listeners awareness off repetition. <ref>Federico Marulanda, “From Logogram to Noise,” in ''Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language'' (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 79-92, 83.</ref> His collaboration with [[Florian Hecker]], ''Palimpsest'', also transliterated Japanese [[Man'yōshū]] poems to sound.<ref>Cisneros, R. Jiménez. (2009) [http://rwm.macba.cat/uploads/qa/QA_01/QA_01.pdf ''BLACKOUT. Representation, transformation and de-control in the sound work of Yasunao Tone'']. Quaderns d'Àudio, Ràdio Web MACBA. Barcelona.</ref>
As Tone noted, ''Musica Iconologos'' was developed specifically for the medium of [[compact disc]]. He wrote, “I had received an offer to publish a CD; however, none of my pieces were suitable for recording. Certain formal elements of the pieces—spatial movement of sound, contrasting acoustic sound with amplified sound, and the use of visuals—made the pieces simply unrecordable. So I had to create something totally devoid of live performance, something that only the CD as a medium could produce.”<ref>Federico Marulanda, “From Logogram to Noise,” in ''Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language'' (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 79-92, 91.</ref> Because the musician’s hand is removed in ''Musica Iconologos'', it can only be played and never performed. The compact disc as a means of dissemination and presentation were therefore integral to the production of the work itself.

Tone began manipulating [[compact discs]] to achieve uniquely mangled sounds in 1984.<ref name="Cox20032">{{cite book|last=Cox|first=Christoph|title=Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music|author2=Daniel Warner|publisher=Continuum International Publishing Group|year=2006|isbn=0-8264-1614-4|pages=341–347}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|title=#1 BLACKOUT. Representation, transformation and de-control in the sound work of Yasunao Tone By Roc Jiménez de Cisneros {{!}} Radio Web MACBA {{!}} RWM Podcasts|url=https://rwm.macba.cat/en/quaderns-daudio/1-blackout-representation-transformation-and-control-sound-work-yasunao-tone-roc|access-date=2021-12-19|website=rwm.macba.cat|language=en}}</ref> Tone's CD-player-based works employ a process of "de-controlling" the device's playback so that it randomly selects fragments from a set of sound materials. Tone stated that the error-correction functionality of modern CD players made it hard to continue to use this technique and, for this reason, he continued to use older equipment.<ref name="Cox20032" /> Tone placed [[scotch-tape]] with small perforations on CD-roms of classical and popular music, causing the player to misread and information on the CD. The result was a unpredictable sonic distortion, uniquely generated by Tone’s intervention into the CD player’s specific technological mechanisms. Tone recounted discovering the process in an interview:

“I called my audiophile friend, who owned a Swiss-made CD player, and asked him about it. It was a simpler method than I suspected. I bought a copy of [[Claude Debussy|Debussy]]’s ''[[Preludes (Debussy)|Preludes]]'' and brought it to my friend’s place. By his engineer friend’s suggestion, we simply made many pinholes on its of Scotch tape and stuck it on the bottom of a CD. I had many trials and errors. I was pleased [with] the result, because the CD player behaved frantically and out of control. [It] was a perfect device for performance.”<ref>Yasunao Tone, from a transcript of an interview published in ''Revue & Corrigée'', No. 46 (2001) as quoted from: Caleb Stuart, “Damaged Sound: Glitching and Skipping Compact Discs in the Audio of Yasunao Tone, Nicolas Collins and Oval,” ''Leonardo Music Journal'' 13 (2003): pp. 47-52, 48.</ref>

In March 1986, Tone performed ''Music for 2 CD Players'' at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York using this method.<ref name=":16" /> According to Tone, Cage sat in the front row and “several minutes after the beginning of the performance he laughed loudly, over and over, until the end.”<ref name=":16">Yasunao Tone, “John Cage and Recording,” ''Leonardo Music Journal'' 13 (2003): pp. 11-15, 12.</ref> After finishing the piece, [[John Cage|Cage]] immediately came up to Tone and shook his hand.<ref>William Marotti, “Sounding the Everyday: the Music Group and Yasunao Tone’s Early Work,” in ''Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language'' (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 13-33, 12.</ref> The technique is also used in his 1997 album, ''Solo for Wounded CD''.   

Always active in the United States with [[avant-garde music]] artists, he was awarded a CAPS Grant in multi-media, a 2004 [[Foundation for Contemporary Arts]] Grants to Artists Award, a [[New York State Council on the Arts]] commission grant for flutist Barbara Held, a [[National Endowment for the Arts]] grant for collaborative work with [[Blondell Cummings]] and Senga Nengdi, and a [[New York Foundation for the Arts]] Fellowship in performance/emerging forms. {{Citation needed|date=May 2008}} Tone performed at [[The Kitchen (art institution)|the Kitchen]], the Experimental Intermedia Foundation, [[P.S.1]]. [[Guggenheim Museum SoHo]], and the [[Chicago Art Club♡♡ among other notable venues.<ref name=":15">Yasunao Tone and Robert Ashley et al., ''Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language'' (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), 98.</ref> He has been included in several institutional group exhibitions at venues such as The [[Whitney Museum of American Art]] in New York City, The Yokohama Triennale 2001 in Yokohama, and the Moderni in the Casselo Museum in Turin.<ref name=":2">Yasunao Tone, “John Cage and Recording,” ''Leonardo Music Journal'' 13 (2003): pp. 11-15, 15.</ref> Music festivals which have  featured Tone include All Tomorrow’s Parties in London, Sonic Light in Amsterdam, and Spectacle Vivante at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.<ref name=":2">Yasunao Tone, “John Cage and Recording,” ''Leonardo Music Journal'' 13 (2003): pp. 11-15, 15.</ref> In 1979 he was given the CAPS grant in multi-media and the Ars Electronica Golden Nica Prize in 2002.<ref name="tonebook98">Tone book 98</ref><ref name=":2">Yasunao Tone, “John Cage and Recording,” ''Leonardo Music Journal'' 13 (2003): pp. 11-15, 15.</ref> In 2023 his work was celebrated with a mini-[[retrospective]] at [[Artists Space]] in New York City that was curated by Danielle A. Jackson.<ref>[https://brooklynrail.org/2023/03/artseen/Yasunao-Tone-Region-of-Paramedia] Yasunao Tone: Region of Paramedia, [[Brooklyn Rail]] art review by Mark Bloch</ref>