SONORITY Koan (2018)
Koan began as an attempt to understand my own instrument — the voice — stripped of everything else.
After years of writing music where the voice carried narrative and emotional storytelling, I began to feel constrained by that role. I wanted to move away from the expectations placed on a vocalist and explore the voice as sound itself: breath, rhythm, texture, resonance.
Instead of building music around meaning and lyrics, Koan explores language as sonic material. Words dissolve into syllables, consonants, fragments and rhythms. The voice moves between speech, noise, melody and abstraction, opening a wider musical space where composition and improvisation coexist.
Field recordings made during a trip to Japan became an important part of this process. Recording sound in temples and public spaces shifted my way of listening. Wind, distant voices, trains and footsteps revealed themselves as complex musical structures. This experience of listening — of recognizing music already present in the surrounding world — became central to the work.
Electronics expanded the possibilities of the voice further. Through live processing, looping and sound transformation, the voice could stretch into new forms, sometimes becoming almost unrecognizable while still carrying the physical gesture of breath and articulation.
Koan became the first work in the ongoing series Sonority. It opened a long-term exploration of the voice as a field of resonance between body, language, technology and environment.
Concept and framework behind KOAN
The compositional method of Koan grew from an investigation of language as a musical structure. Language contains multiple rhythmic layers: syllables create sonic attacks and textures, words form patterns, and sentences produce larger structural movements. These elements belong to what linguistics describes as prosody — the rhythm, stress and intonation of speech.
In the work, Zen koans were used as a source of textual material. Rather than focusing on their philosophical meaning, the texts were treated as phonetic structures. Their letters, syllables and rhythms became compositional constraints that guided the musical material.
Working with these texts introduced an element of indeterminacy into the process. The order of letters and sounds influenced the direction of the music, sometimes leading to places that would not have appeared through purely intuitive writing. This method created a productive tension between control and chance.
At the same time, the work moved away from fixed compositions toward a hybrid practice where composition and improvisation merge. Instead of prescribing every musical event, pieces often rely on sets of restrictions or “dogmas” that limit the available sound materials while leaving space for spontaneous interaction.
Field recordings and electronics further extend this system. Environmental sounds act as external sonic material, while live electronic processing transforms the voice into new textures and spatial layers. In many moments, the original vocal source becomes almost unrecognizable, yet its physical impulse remains embedded in the sound.
Through this process, voice, text, and electronics form a continuous feedback loop. The voice generates the material, technology reshapes it, and the resulting sound environment feeds back into the performer’s improvisation.
Koan, therefore, functions less as a fixed composition and more as a research process: an ongoing exploration of the voice as both instrument and compositional system.