ABOUT TAKUTO:

Takuto Fukuda is a composer, sound artist and gestural controller performer who navigated schizophrenia, a psychosis that invokes auditory delusions and visual hallucinations, due to the social disconnectedness during the COVID-19 pandemic. This experience led him to recognize the power of live music concerts–i.e. providing a shared musical experience regardless of audiences’ sociocultural backgrounds–, and to address the question: What are the factors with which contemporary audiences engage in live concerts today? His research revealed that the prevalence of audiovisual media catalyzed the transition of these factors from performers’ actual musicianship to the recreation of hyperreal performances – performances that have never existed in reality but were created with the extensive use of computer-generated audiovisual content (e.g., hologram avatars performing on computer-generated tracks).

These insights drove him to explore the intersection of human performance and computational technologies, evident in his various composition styles such as mixed music compositions that combine audiovisual content with human performers, gamified compositions that allow for real-time, interactive, and chance-based musical compositions, and music for gestural controllers. He has received several accolades at competitions such as the ICU International Composers Contest (Ukraine), Andrew Svoboda Memorial Prize (Canada) and ISMIR2020 (Canada), and has been selected for performance at numerous music festivals across the world such as ArsElectronica (Austria), ISCM World Music Days 2016 (Korea) and ICMCs (Slovenia, Greece, USA).

He received his Doctor of Music in composition from McGill University and is currently pursuing postdoctoral studies at Concordia University.