Yuichi Matsumoto, a young artist and IAMAS graduate, has followed his computer music and performance series: "Anketo (enquête) Art." Matsumoto was a student of Masahiro Miwa at IAMAS and attended my class of contemporary theory. I wrote this brief essay to celebrate his being nominated to the final selection of Toru Takemitsu Award. I really wish him luck.

As a child born ten years after the end of the Pacific War, I encountered the word democracy in the third or fourth year (around the age eight or nine) of the primary school. In the post-war Japan, there ruled a strong direction to promote democracy in every corner of the society, especially in education. The US Occupation Forces commanded teachers to sweep off militarist mentality from children's mind. One day our teacher came to the class and told us to elect a class leader. What is election? we asked. It's democracy, he answered. Formerly teachers appointed the best student a class leader. Now we live in a democratic society, we are all equal, even teachers and pupils. So we should vote, to decide important things, as it is the only way to know what most of us really want. We didn't understand how teachers and pupils could be "equal," but felt the word "democracy" sound cool. It sounded very American.

As democracy itself is invisible and hard to understand, people accepted it as the practice of voting, election, looking at public opinion poll, and asking questionnaires. People even transformed these secular versions of democracy into entertainment in quiz or variety shows on TV, featured articles in magazines. Walking in downtown you are often requested to answer every kind of questionnaires. When you find it hard to decide your attitude to a latest issue, look at "Vox Populi (people's voice)." Though few of are quite serious about how precisely the voice represents the mind of the society, and many think it's just fun fun to know, the result of any questionnaire (regardless of the number of respondents) has some power. Today college professors are required to have their lectures evaluated by students through questionnaires. I know how a stupid comment made by an anonymous student can bother us, while we can discuss a problem if we hear the same comment face in face. So it's not a comment itself, but in the very form of questionnaire, that seems to have power.

A composer Yuichi Matsumoto has developed a simple but original method to create computer music performance using the questionnaire. He calls it "Anketo Art" ('Anketo' is a Japanese word for questionnaire, taken from French word 'enquête.') The composer first make a questionnaire sheet, asking opinions about often politically touchy issues like "Article nine of Japanese Constitution" or "Atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki." He collect the answers and feed their text data to his program. The program analyses the text and classifies them into different parts of speech, like nouns, verbs, particles, punctuation marks and so on, and relate each of them to a certain musical pitch. And the length of a word corresponds to the length of sound. In this way, melodies and rhythms are generated automatically.

But it is not just a automated computer music. Using this system, he has organized "Anketo Art" performances with strong live factors. At one time, I remember a performer in formal suit and tie seriously read aloud the original answers, with computer-generated music corresponding to what is read, in the background. Another time, Matsumoto asked me and artist Tadasu Takamine to "chat" on note PC in front of the audience, making comments on each answer, and both the answers and our comments were projected, scrolling on the screen. In spite of the outspoken political tone of the questionnaire, the works are far from political in a normal sense. Through these performances, the artist seems to address to the questionnaire itself, as a widely recognized form to represent the public's mind in our democratic society.

I think Matsumoto's work reveals certain uneasy feeling we have in a society where democracy is the final card to prove your political correctness. Sigmund Freud investigated a fundamental uneasiness of living in culture, in a treatise titled "Das Unbehangen in der Kultur" (which should literally be translated into "Uneasiness in the Culture", though normally known as "Civilization and Its Discontents"). As we cannot get rid of culture, we cannot do without democracy. But of course, what we really experience in our life, voting, elections and the public opinion poll, are NOT democracy itself. We know, deep in our mind, that any questionnaire cannot possibly represent a voice of the public. What I really find interesting about "Anketo Art" is that the work attempts to dissolve this uneasiness into a nonchalant and humorous computer music performance.

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