Micro Orchestrism

Process / Details

Inspiration

Music Fermentation

Getting inspired by the story of experimental Japanese sake brewers who use musical elements into their practice, this work imagines: “What if we used music to explore our co-creative relationship with microorganisms?”

Initial research
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Interview

Potential uniqueness in attitudes towards microorganisms in East Asian culture.

Field visit to sake breweries

I visited several sake breweries in Japan and in the United States, then found the uniqueness in the Japanese brewers attitudes shown below, and developed the concept based on them.

“We use our five senses to explore how we can help koji mold ― the microbes that initiate sake fermentation－ live comfortably”

“If abnormal smells drifts through the room, we ask ourselves how the koji might be feeling and then take steps to address the issue”

“It’s important to respect the boundary between humans and microbes”

“Although we can guide them to create a specific sake taste, it’s microbes that decide the final taste”

“We do our part, and then hand over the baton to microbes, trusting them with what comes next”

Among certain brewers, flavor is understood as the creative output of microbes. Brewing thus becomes a negotiation: between the managerial drive for consistent quality and a reverent willingness to work with living agents who resist total control. Micro Orchestrism stages these frictions and affinities between nonhuman processes and human making as a form of co-composition.

Bubble as an essential yeast's body languages

Sake brewing is a collaborative creative practice between humans and yeast, where an ethic of care toward microorganisms endures.

The flavor of sake springs from a creative dialogue: brewers engage their five senses to guide the process, and yeasts respond by crafting taste based on that carefully tuned environment. Brewers already “read” fermentation by watching bubbles—each one a tiny breath from the yeast. It is both an act of caring another form of life and an attempt to control it. Yet, microorganisms cannot be fully controlled; making good sake requires a sustained “dialogue” between brewer and yeast.

The work translates this charged relation into sound—a co-composed music of humans and fermenting yeast.

Situating gagaku in interplay with nonhuman nature

Gagaku is a Japan’s ancient court music whose modes, performance practice, and natural-material instruments have remained remarkably almost continuous for over fourteen centuries.

Gagaku instruments are made from natural materials and are characterized by timbres rich in noise and overtones—qualities abundant in the sounds of nature.

One facet of gagaku—often performed outdoors—is its openness to contingency: sounds of nature such as pine breeze and river murmurs can be folded into its beauty. It can also be read as music that finds beauty in overtones and roughness native to natural sound, aspiring to a becoming-with nature.

In this respect, gagaku may be understood—again like brewing—as a more-than-human practice: music woven with weather, breath, and incident, in which beauty is achieved through the negotiated interplay of human intention and nonhuman agency.

Sake yeast as intermediary of spirits

In Shinto ritual, sake—brewed from rice gifted by the gods—is first offered to kami and then shared communally, binding people to the sacred. I thought microbes quietly drive this transformation, turning rice into sake through fermentation and acting as unseen intermediaries between humans and kami. This project highlights that creative partnership—respecting microbes’ power without deifying them—to explore how humans and microorganisms can collaborate in new, expressive ways.