Miya Masaoka

Composer, performer, sound artist, and writer Miya Masaoka began her work as a kotoist, studying traditional techniques of Western and Japanese music. Today she is an experimental artist whose installations, performances, and soundworks for plants pose questions about the relations between humans and the world around them. Using advanced technologies to extract sonic information from living beings, Masaoka has worked with Madagascan cockroaches, the electrical signals from the bodies of ten naked Asian men, and the sounds of swarming bees. In Pieces for Plants (2003), highly sensitive electrodes are connected between the leaves of the philodendron and a laptop computer. People move their hands around the leaves and hear the plant speak back to them: the voice seemingly the plant’s physiological response to interactions. The piece suggests that plants have an awareness, are part of our living network of beings, and can communicate with us if we learn how. Masaoka has performed this piece in New York at the Lincoln Center’s Out of Doors Homemade Instrument Day. Versions of the piece have also been presented in a musical setting in which the plant participates as a member and soloist within an instrumental ensemble. Here she has set the piece free for us to navigate other participants’ compositional conversation with the plant and listen to their dialogues.

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