I'm excited to be undertaking a project in collaboration with Shakuhachi player and fellow composer Shawn Renzoh Head. I will be building an artificial neural network and training it on the traditional Shakuhachi solo repertoire, in order to then compose a suite of pieces for Shawn to play. Shawn will aid me in sourcing the training repertoire and creating a machine-readable dataset from it, which we will also make available for others to use in their own projects.
Shawn is the youngest non-Japanese Shakuhachi player to have received his Shihan, or 'Master of Shakuhachi', certification, and was a pupil of my own Shakuhachi teacher, Michael Chikuzen Gould. I'm glad to have him on board with my crazy compositional idea and I look forward to working with him!