My Compositional History: From Romantic Microtonalism to an Original Tuning System (2005–2026)

1. Three Notes on a Mobile Phone and My Early Interest

My first activity resembling composition took place around 2005, when I was nine. My maternal aunt was by no means a nerd, yet around 2005 she owned about five feature phones. When I visited her house during summer vacation or on some similar occasion, I found an unused NTT Docomo or au handset gathering dust in a drawer and asked, "Can I have it?" She gave me one. It had no service contract and could not connect to the internet. Wondering what it could do, I explored the handset and found an application called "Composition."

The application could produce only three notes. I knew no music theory, so I pressed the buttons at random to find out what sounds they made. I could not yet create anything that could be called a piece of music, but I thought that I would surely become a composer someday.

In retrospect, the mobile phone my aunt had left unused became the technical point of origin of my compositional activity. My first encounter with composition involved neither staff notation nor instrumental performance, but entering sounds into a machine and listening to the playback. This is directly connected to my present method of production: I still use a DAW and software instruments, entering each note one by one with a mouse.

Meanwhile, in my sixth-grade graduation essay, I named "elucidating the early universe before the Big Bang" as my future ambition. The intuition that I would become a composer and my interest in cosmology were not competing alternatives; both were already present at the same time.

2. An Interest in Popular Music

Also around fourth grade, I heard ABBA's Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!, which my parents happened to play at home, and became strongly attracted to music itself. I did not continue listening to ABBA for long, however; my interest quickly shifted to the Beatles. I listened especially intensively to Rubber Soul, Revolver, and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

From there I listened to all the major names in rock, including Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, and Led Zeppelin, and then moved on to Procol Harum, the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and SMiLE, Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, and the Velvet Underground. I later expanded my range to the 13th Floor Elevators, the Zombies, Shocking Blue, and Syd Barrett's solo works. In my own mental curriculum, the first group constituted the required survey course in psychedelic rock and the second the advanced seminar; I had listened to them intensively by the end of junior high school.

What I acquired from this was not the imitation of particular chord progressions or recording techniques. It was the recognition that music could do more than arrange melodies and chords: it could construct a world with its own atmosphere, gravity, color, and sense of time. This sense of world-building later became the basis for connecting the symphony, cosmology, and microtonal tonality.

3. Composing Throwaway Pieces from "A" to "BF"

At thirteen, near the end of my first year of junior high school, I suddenly remembered, "Oh, right - I was going to become a composer." By around 2009 I could use the family computer fairly freely, so I searched for "free composition software," found the Mino-style MIDI Sequencer, and downloaded it.

I did not assume that installing the software would immediately make me capable of composing. I judged that I did not yet have the ability required of a composer, so I gave the works no individual titles. I called the first piece A, followed by B, C, and D, and after Z came AA. Rather than spending time inventing titles to make the pieces look like finished works, I prioritized increasing the number of compositional attempts.

From about thirteen to fifteen, I composed every day and produced more than eighty pieces, from A to approximately BF. I assumed that all of them would eventually be discarded. Rather than repeatedly checking and correcting works that I intended to throw away, I decided that I would build more fundamental ability by finishing each piece within a few days, moving on to the next, and repeatedly practicing how to begin, develop, and end a work. I therefore did almost no revision or correction.

I was clearly not a Mendelssohn-type compositional prodigy. Insofar as I recognized my own lack of ability and acquired skill by repeating composition like exam preparation, I was closer to a Rossini type. What appeared early was not compositional polish, but the intelligence to design the most effective training method for myself.

4. Comprehensive Listening to Classical Music

In high school I joined the wind band, where I first learned to read scores seriously and play an instrument. Around this time I began giving my works titles and organizing them into albums. There were ten albums, spanning progressive rock, psychedelic rock, wind-band music, classical music, and contemporary music. The pieces I then presented as classical or contemporary music, however, did not yet possess the substance to have value in concert performance; their structures remained closer to popular-music forms. At around seventeen, I finally felt that I had reached a level at which the results could objectively be called compositions.

I came to think quite consciously that psychedelic rock and progressive rock represented the summit of commercial music, and that anything higher existed only in the world of classical music. I then intuited that classical music was the most important field to which I should devote myself throughout my life.

I first immersed myself in Beethoven's symphonies, Schubert's Great C major Symphony, and the symphonies of Schumann and Brahms, becoming a symphony nerd. I then heard Debussy's La mer. The opening harp and low strings alone made my whole body tremble; a tingling sensation spread through me, and I thought, "This is it." For me, this was not merely the discovery of another favorite composer. It was the first time I clearly experienced the birth of an immersive universe from timbre and harmony alone.

From there I listened, from morning to night every day and with almost manic intensity, to music ranging from Bach to Toru Takemitsu; later my scope extended from Monteverdi and Palestrina to Lachenmann. From high school through university, I wrote out complete lists of each composer's works in a text file, recorded the composer's age when each work was composed, and rated every piece myself. At university I listened with the same comprehensiveness to composers ranging from Dufay to competition composers in their twenties, such as Shiqi Geng, a finalist for the Toru Takemitsu Composition Award. Rather than merely collecting famous masterpieces, I turned everything - even obscure sketches - into a listening task, and continued analyzing with the same manic intensity what each composer acquired at each age, where the style changed, at what age the masterpieces appeared, and at what age the composer died (see Appendix).

5. The University Symphonies and Why They Remained Private

During university, my composition shifted completely toward classical music, and Romantic symphonies became my central activity. I composed a symphony, finished it, and then composed another. My unpublished series included Practice Symphonies Nos. 0, 00, and 1 through 20; Study Symphonies Nos. 1 through 5; "Symphonies with Scores" Nos. 1 through 6; and a further set of unpublished Symphonies Nos. 1 through 5. In total, there were more than thirty.

The "Symphonies with Scores" series began as an attempt to prepare full scores, but notation eventually became tiresome, and despite the name, the works have no scores. The unpublished Symphonies Nos. 1 through 5 use microtones throughout. Nos. 2 and 3 in particular last more than two hours and include a children's chorus in 17-EDO and a mixed chorus in 24-EDO.

These works brought together my childhood interest in cosmology, the world-building derived from psychedelic rock, the extended duration of the symphony, contemporary music, and microtonality. To me they were not simply large works; they stood on the continuation of my life from childhood onward.

I therefore believed that if I released them and received no response, or a negative one, the result would not merely be the failure of a single work: it would call into question the significance of everything I had done as a composer. I enjoyed creating and listening to my own music, but I also wondered whether I was satisfied only because I was making the sounds I personally liked. Releasing a two-hour symphony directly would have amounted to staking my entire life against that doubt, so I avoided doing so.

6. Releasing Adagio for Strings and the End of a Two-Tier Practice

I uploaded Adagio for Strings to YouTube on June 22, 2017. It was a 24-EDO piece that I had dashed off in a single day in 2016, so I thought that however harshly it might be rejected, I could reply, "I made this in only one day; the two-hour symphonies are my real life's work." Yet no matter how long I waited, no hostile commenters appeared, and the subscriber count continued to rise. For the first time, I gained the sense that I was not merely pleasing myself by making and listening to my own music: my musical sensibility apparently communicated to other people as well.

I then uploaded the contemporary-music-oriented microtonal works that, after the two-hour symphonies, I had regarded as my main line of work. They were a complete flop. At first I concluded that YouTube's audience simply lacked sophistication. Yet even composers who plainly deserve a place in history, such as Lachenmann and Georg Friedrich Haas, remain almost entirely unknown to the general public, and not only on YouTube. Complaining about the audience would change nothing. I therefore decided that on YouTube I should make works suited to YouTube, and shifted my style slightly in a more accessible direction.

It is not unusual for contemporary composers to move from a difficult and aggressive youthful style toward tonal, more approachable works. When they do, they often offer explanations such as: "I was sharp-edged when I was young, but eventually realized that music is, after all, about connections between people"; "music exists within society"; "as I grew older, I began to think about social and educational contribution"; "after experiencing a natural disaster, I reconsidered the role of music"; or "writing works that performers enjoy playing is not a surrender to commercialism." Such statements retrospectively dress up a less flattering history: the composer wrote self-indulgent works in youth, audiences and performers rejected them completely, and for years the composer blamed this on everyone else's failure to understand. The history is repackaged in the language of maturity, sociability, public value, education, and relations with others. Rather than admitting plainly that difficult works were not heard and the style was changed accordingly, the composer appears on television or in interviews to declare that "music is ultimately about connections between people." Adaptation to an audience is thereby promoted not as artistic retreat but as human maturation. My own stylistic change was different. I did not newly awaken to the importance of human relationships or social contribution. I observed the responses to the works I released, identified what kinds of music were and were not heard on YouTube, and simply posted works suited to the medium of publication.

I continued operating on the principle that only music appropriate for YouTube should be posted there. I did not immediately discontinue the "serious music" intended to remain private, but I gradually came to feel that spending long periods on works nobody would understand was a poor use of time, and the pace declined during the latter half of 2020. By 2021, the division between "serious music intended to remain private" and "accessible works for YouTube" had disappeared completely - not through an explicit change of policy, but because the former simply faded away.

7. Romantic Microtonalism and Testing 17EDO

The 2021 Serenade for Harp and Strings was a successful example of the single practice that emerged through this natural attrition. Although it used 24-EDO, it did not relegate microtones to clusters or special effects, but treated them through Romantic melody, harmony, and the sonority of strings and harp. After its release on April 22, 2021, the video surpassed ten thousand views and five hundred likes, without receiving a single dislike.

I regard this direction as Romantic Microtonalism. Rather than presenting microtones as an acoustic experiment, it uses them within the Romantic vocabulary of melody, harmonic tension, long musical breaths, motivic development, enormous climaxes, longing, and tragedy. The later Symphony for String Orchestra became the clearest expression of a microtonal late-Romantic musical language.

During the same period, I composed a large body of work in 17-EDO. To me, 17-EDO is cheerful, psychedelic, unhinged, and yet approachable. Even a simple triad does not collapse into cheap-sounding tonal music, mass-produced background music, or mass-produced music in a modern French style. It is less generally versatile as a microtonal system than 19-EDO and some others; in my own use, its central materials are enriched triads and four-note chords.

Because its triads are tuned almost too neatly, 19-EDO approaches ordinary tonal music when used straightforwardly. When extensive use is made of adjacent sub-semitonal steps in an attempt to create a sense of the unknown, however, the music easily becomes fussy and forbidding. Excessive use of 24-EDO likewise tends to converge on ghosts, unusual sounds, sound effects, and clusters. For me, 17-EDO achieved the best balance: it retained a recognizable sense of tonality while allowing even simple chords to possess a personality unlike that of existing music.

My perception of 17-EDO also shares certain features with those of earlier composers. Easley Blackwood observed that triads in 17-EDO are strongly roughened by their wide major thirds, while the scale itself is excellent because it has relatively small minor seconds; he used a four-note chord consisting of a minor triad plus a minor seventh as a basic consonant sonority. Sevish has described 17-EDO as "angular, intuitive, colourful." For Blackwood, however, 17-EDO was one tuning in a series comparing equal temperaments from 13 through 24 notes, while Sevish likewise worked across many tuning systems. In my case, 17-EDO became the principal compositional language through which I sustained a large output of piano pieces, sonatas, preludes, and suites. My basic chord in 17-EDO consists of steps 0, 3, 6, and 10 of the seventeen-note octave. On a DAW piano roll designed for 12-EDO it appears as C♯–E–G–B, but its actual pitches are approximately 0, 212, 424, and 706 cents, with successive spacings of 3-3-4 steps. A fifth of approximately 706 cents forms the outer frame, while the wide major third inside it is divided into two whole-tone-sized intervals. Blackwood likewise used a four-note chord rather than an ordinary triad as his basic consonance in 17-EDO, adding a minor seventh to a minor triad; my basic chord instead fills the span of the fifth with four notes rather than adding a seventh.

In 17-EDO I composed large numbers of piano pieces, sonatas, preludes, intermezzi, ballades, suites, and harp works, repeatedly testing which intervals preserved approachability and how far pitch density could be increased before musical direction and emotional logic disappeared. Going back slightly, I entered an UnTwelve competition in 2018, received a prize, and for some reason was added to its mailing list. I even read emails from Easley Blackwood, who was still alive and subscribed to the same list. Sevish commented on my works between roughly 2020 and 2022 and seemed particularly fond of the pieces in 19-EDO. Some composers show little attachment to any particular tuning system; I continued to mine 17-EDO intensively.

8. Discovering an Original Tuning System in Prelude X

On June 22, 2023, exactly six years after my first YouTube upload, I released Prelude X, written in an original seventeen-note tuning system of my own. The title is a play on Pierre Boulez's Polyphonie X. After composing extensively in 17-EDO, I moved from it into an original tuning system. This was not a tuning I had designed in advance to create a new chapter of music history; it emerged naturally after I had exhausted 17-EDO.

The Misterioso beginning at 0:00 proceeds at a slow tempo, chiefly between mp and pp, creating music trapped in a narrow space, as though Berg's Piano Sonata had become still more claustrophobic. At 3:56, when Arditamente, Tempestoso begins, a rapid trill suddenly erupts at forte. The trill alone sounds fairly ordinary, but when combined with the bass it ceases to sound like a piano and acquires a metallic, gamelan-like sonority.

Indeed, its sound was closer to actual gamelan than the gamelan-like sonorities Debussy depicted within Western music. Yet it did not arrive as the repetition of percussion music; it surged forward while retaining clearly Western pitch organization, harmony, motives, and direction. The sonority of gamelan and the constructive logic of Western music sounded simultaneously. The piece ends with a rapid ascending figure reminiscent of Scriabin's Piano Sonata No. 5. This gamelan-trill technique is reused in the second half of Ballade No. 4.

When I heard this piece, I trembled intensely even though it was my own work. Psychedelic rock, Debussy, cosmology, microtones, tonality, and an entire world sounded together for the first time. After its release, listeners asked why it did not sound out of tune like other microtonal music, and one comment called it "Outer Space Debussy." I subsequently composed many works in the same tuning, demonstrating that this sonority was not a one-piece accident.

I have now become accustomed to this tuning, so it no longer makes me tremble as it did on first hearing. Yet the sensation of hearing something one has never heard before is the most important resource in classical and contemporary music - and the one depleted most quickly. The experience of first hearing Scelsi, Varèse's Ionisation, Schoenberg's twelve-tone music, Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, Ligeti's Atmosphères, or the sonorities of Takemitsu has a value distinct from that of hearing a work whose melody is simply good.

Prelude X uses no video, spatial distribution, bodily performance, flamboyant electronic sound, new performance apparatus, interactive technology, AI, or multimedia. It has tonal melody and harmony; only the pitch relationships of the piano are unusual. Yet music unlike anything I had previously heard came into being. I do not regard Prelude X as my favorite work, but if I had to name one work from the perspective of music history, it would be this one.

9. Major Works and Recent Developments

eternal Idée Fixe is an approximately thirty-minute piano work that I composed after my lifetime output had exceeded one thousand pieces, when I decided that I had to produce, at least provisionally, the greatest work in the history of 17-EDO myself. It has a floating quality, as though drifting through a dream. At the end of the finale, repeated figures and the percussive sound of the keystrokes are emphasized as the music fades away as though dying out (morendo). If a practical 17-EDO piano is realized and the performance difficulties are resolved, I believe this is the work of mine most likely to be widely performed in the future.

My favorite of my own works is the Symphony for String Orchestra. On holidays I set aside time to listen to it, and it still moves me every time. In the first great climax of the Adagio, the oboe and several horns take the central role as the music approaches the theme. The horns divide into a 0-cent group and a 33-cent group, forming a thick microtonal consonance. I call this the "Longing Chord." It is not an ordinary consonance with added roughness; it possesses a sense of consonance that gradually expands and seems to reach the brain directly. The work is Romantic Microtonalist music influenced chiefly by Bruckner and Franck, but also by Mahler and modern French music, and its Adagio contains a Bruckner-like climax of enormous scale. In the finale's coda, an austere melody reminiscent of Franck's String Quartet appears, along with a bass clarinet solo. The scherzo's sub-semitonal scale may evoke a microtonal version of one of Hindemith's string quartets. The repeated use of violin solos in an unusually low register is a favorite device of Richard Strauss, while all movements except the scherzo use the cyclic form common in modern music, with the same motives recurring. Every element of the musical language used in this work could have existed in the era of Wyschnegradsky and Hába, so its contribution to music history is unclear. As music, however, it is plainly excellent, and it has received the strongest audience response.

I subsequently composed the piano opera The Asteroidal Sequence of Metaphysical Ulysses. The enormous private universe of my two-hour university symphonies and the method of making public works that I had acquired since Adagio for Strings here re-entered a large-scale form. The portion released in advance as Part I, before the entire opera was complete, received a favorable response. The completed version, however, lasting approximately three hours and forty minutes, was given fewer impressions by YouTube's recommendation algorithm than Adagio for Strings. At some point, belatedly, the algorithm will probably begin recommending the opera. It will then predictably present this as though the previous error had been corrected and the system had "improved." Yet later recommendations cannot restore the time lost at release, the contemporary audience, or the opportunity for the work to be received as a new work. The ugliness extends even to the attempt to cleanse a past failure by later acknowledging the mistake.

I am now instructing the recommendation infrastructure in plain terms: do not repeatedly recommend Adagio for Strings, a successful work from long ago; recommend this piano opera. A recommendation system that merely reproduces past click histories fixes an artist's successful work among the early pieces, deprives the representative work of the opportunity to become recognized as such, and grows obsolete as cultural infrastructure. I am now teaching it clearly what it should recommend. Having nevertheless missed the work, it cannot later reverse this failure.

In 2025 I substantially expanded my collection of software instruments and audio equipment, and as of 2026 I am concentrating on orchestral works. Pianoteq permits me to configure my original tuning systems freely, but commercial orchestral libraries often support only quarter-tone adjustments at best. Even those create problems in the transitions between legato samples when used melodically. I therefore compose with a clear understanding of the constraints on available microtones, ranges, voicing, timbre, and articulation.

In my orchestral and chamber works of 2026, I have focused intensely on sound quality so that general audiences can enjoy them as well. I believe I have achieved sound better than that of commercial CDs, yet their YouTube impressions have not grown. Because none has received a single dislike, the works are not being rejected by those who actually hear them. Perhaps listeners are especially interested in the experience of hearing music itself for the first time through an original tuning system.

Conclusion

I have long believed that it is difficult to produce an invention of music-historical significance using the combination of conventional instruments and 12-EDO. The movement of contemporary music (apart from microtonality and complexity) toward electroacoustics, spatialization, the body, video, new performance apparatus, interaction, AI, and multimedia is also related to this recognition. It has been widely assumed that conventional pitches and conventional instruments leave no remaining room to create music unlike anything previously heard.

Since 2016, however, I have believed that microtonality still contains territories that have not been sufficiently composed, and I continued using 17-EDO across a large body of works. The original tuning system of Prelude X appeared beyond that labor. The discovery itself was serendipitous, but I would never have reached that place without using 17-EDO for years and repeatedly testing its simple chords, tonality, musical direction, and pitch density. After Prelude X, I was able to compose many works in the same original tuning. Using the existing instrument of the piano, adding neither video nor apparatus, and changing only the pitch relationships, music that sounded unknown yet retained melody and harmony came into being. Tonal territories of this kind still remain outside 12-EDO.