As a boy who loved making things, I was constantly struggling with the limitations of “material” and harboring a certain sense of defeat. Before the inherent hardness of materials like wood and metal, and the wall of skilled technique required for processing them, I felt a frustrating inability to fully embody the images within me. Consequently, I was forced to play within the boundaries of easily processed materials, such as “paper crafts” and “plastic models,” where the limits were already drawn for me.
Into this world of stagnation, an “immaterial” revolution arrived one day. It was the world of the MSX personal computer and the BASIC programming language, which I discovered through a learning magazine. The concept of programming struck me like a bolt from the blue. In that world, there is no such thing as a cutting failure or material degradation. If you describe commands logically and correctly, the system responds without a hair’s breadth of error.
This “creative space where reproducibility is guaranteed” liberated me from the constraints of physical laws and set me free into a realm of pure intellectual play. My first experience with music production also took place on this MSX computer. By typing in a string of symbols called MML (Music Macro Language) and executing the “PLAY” statement, a world of three-voice harmony generated by the PSG sound chip would unfold before me. The process where sound is generated by written code (symbols), rather than depending on the nuances of fingertips hitting a keyboard, appeared exquisitely elegant to me.
I began by inputting ensemble scores from music textbooks. When a melody resonated through the space via the “commands” I had written, I felt a quiet sense of omnipotence—a feeling that I was in complete control of the system, which transcended mere subjective emotion. Soon, my interest shifted to reproducing the music I heard in arcades. I became obsessed with the joy of recreating tracks like Sega’s *Hang-On* or Nichibutsu’s *Terra Cresta* with my own hands.
The constraint of three-voice harmony on the PSG sound chip might seem at first glance to narrow the range of expression. However, within it lay an intellectual process of trial and error that could be called the “aesthetics of subtraction.” Deciding which notes to extract and where to place them within a limited number of voices—this task of pseudo-constructing a multi-layered sound gave me the pleasure of a highly refined design process, a different quality of satisfaction from the struggles I had experienced in my earlier physical crafts.
To be honest, I had a faint complex about “not being able to play an instrument” at the time. Yet, by mediating through a logical device like the MSX, that inferiority was transformed into a unique identity. It was a kind of paradoxical pride: “one who cannot play an instrument is performing music through logic.” It was an attempt to intervene in the musical world through intellect, independent of physical dexterity.
The inorganic electronic sounds coming from the speakers were never cold to me. Rather, I felt that the precise sense of tempo, which excluded human ambiguity, was the honest and distinct personality of computer music. Beyond the joy of presenting a finished song, I found deep fulfillment in gazing at the orderly rows of the program list. That list was a record of my musical sensibility manifesting as a framework of logic, appearing with a tangible sense of reality.
The boy who once loved crafts but was hindered by physical constraints thus acquired the transparent material of “command and process,” and learned the art of constructing his own firm, though formless, musical world. Having gained this new playground of logic, I eventually reached out toward the even more complex and colorful world of FM synthesis: the PC-8801FH.
