Tatsuya Takahashi was born in 1982 in Shizuoka, Japan. At 6 months old his family moved to Frankfurt, and at 2 years old they moved to London where they settled. Tatsuya speaks a lot about wanting control in his life, he found control through technology. At 13 he began building speakers in his garage, he then started to branch out into broader electronics, pulling apart keyboards and making simple oscillators. Tatsuya attended Cambridge university and studied general engineering, structural engineering, thermal dynamics, electrical information sciences and control theory. Shifting his interests from playing back sounds to generating sounds, Tatsuya did a masters in analogue electronics, which set him on his career building analogue synthesisers.
Takahashi believed that synthesisers should be everywhere. In the same way someone can bring an acoustic guitar to a park and play a song, people should be able to be mobile with synthesisers. After university Tatsuya set his eyes on working for a synthesiser company, he had an abundance of knowledge on building synthesisers, but little knowledge on the industry. Being of Japanese heritage, he settled on Korg which was founded and based in Japan. In 2006 he moved to Japan and started working for the company. His first project was the microKORG XL, this synthesiser was already in production when he joined and so he had little control over the project. His input was slightly limited as the product was a digital synth, but it was still a valuable experience as it was his first experience working high speed electronics and his first time making a mass producible product. To summarise this experience, Tatsuya says ‘it was very educational but not very creative for me’. He managed to have more control over his second project, the KORG Monotron. It was the first analogue synth Korg released since the 1980’s, it was a very simple compact machine. The most important aspect of this experience was the transition from one off devices to producing tens of thousands of them. This experience shifted Tatsuya’s focus to think more about how he could make music making more accessible to people. Tatsuya created the Volca in later years, this was the definitive expression of this idea.
A collaboration with Apex Twin on the Korg monologue triggered a desire in Takahashi to pursue more interesting projects outside of Korg. In 2017 he left the company and moved to Cologne, he then joined a brand agency with a goal to work with more artists. The company was Yadastar, it was a brand agency for red bull producing redbull academy works. Through this he was able to work with artists that he admired, one of which was Ryoji Ikeda. They collaborated on an instrument, they made a hundred of them and performed a piece. Tatsuya really enjoyed this process, it was a middle ground between mass produced products and one off products. The piece was only performed once, and tatsuya appreciated this self destructive process, creating a piece of hardware and using it only once. They gathered one hundred car enthusiasts with large sound systems, and gave them each one of these devices tatsuya had designed. Ikeda composed a piece designed for this medium called ‘A for one hundred cars’ which explored different versions of the note A through history, the slight variations in frequencies. The result was a massive drone piece composed of 100 versions of the note A weaving in and out of each other, this was played through the cars sound systems in LA. Another project tatsuya did with Yadastar for RBMA was the ‘Granular Convolver’. This was a device that combined granular synthesis with convolution, convolution being the process of combining two signals together in terms of frequency. This was not mass produced, it was for a project where the device was given to a number of participants to create with. Tatsuya found it very interesting to watch how these artists would use his device, some manipulating field recording, some combining instruments with samples. This project provided Tatsuya with a desire to create mass producible products again, it just so happened to be that red bull sacked the agency shortly after this forcing him to make the change. Takahashi then went back to Korg to open their factory in Berlin, he now works with a small team creating musical equipment.
What I take from this talk is that it is important to love the work that you do, that is the best way to have an influence on the world.
‘Altruism is the most rational form of selfishness’
– Jaques Attali
‘selfishness is the most rational form of altruism’
-Tatsuya Takahashi