Body of Sounding:Plate by Taito Fushimi

➡️ This talk is part of IRCAM Forum Workshops Hors-les-Murs Tokyo 2026

Body of Sounding: Plate

Sound passes through spaces and materials before it reaches the listener, and is shaped by their physical properties. Such changes are usually treated as conditions to be controlled in order to reproduce sound as intended. In this project, by contrast, spaces and materials are considered not simply as environments for reproduction, but as elements that shape the sound that emerges.

Resonance as a Physical State

The project focuses in particular on the vibrations and resonances that occur as sound moves through matter. A vibration introduced into an object travels through its structure, excites multiple vibrational modes, and gradually decays over time. As a result, the physical state of the object at a given moment contains not only the influence of the current input, but also traces of vibrations that occurred before it. Rather than approaching resonance only as an acoustic effect that contributes timbre or a sense of space, this project considers what happens when it is understood as a continuously changing physical state.

Physical Reservoir Computing as a Framework

A single aluminum plate is treated as a scaled-down acoustic space. The project investigates how the history of acoustic input remains present within such a physical system and how those traces evolve through its subsequent states. Physical Reservoir Computing is referenced as a framework for approaching this process. In conventional applications of Physical Reservoir Computing, the dynamics of a physical system are typically used as an intermediate state from which a desired output can be read. In this project, however, the primary interest lies less in computational performance than in the physical state itself: what remains within the material after sound has passed through it, how that state changes over time, and how it may become perceptible through sound.

From Experiment to Installation

The project therefore moves between experimental investigation and installation practice. The experiments with the aluminum plate examine how acoustic input is reflected in the changing state of a resonant physical system. The installation develops from the same question, exploring how processes that are normally treated as intermediate, incidental, or external to the final sonic output might themselves become material for sonic expression.