Keitaro Takahashi

Keitaro Takahashi is a Japanese composer, media artist, and programmer. He currently is a research fellow at CeReNeM (Center for Research in New Music) the University of Huddersfield in the UK, as a user interface designer and audio signal processing/analysis developer of “IRiMaS (Interactive Research in Music as Sound)” (2017-2022) funded by European Research Council.

With his artistic background established both in Japan and Switzerland, his artistic interests as a composer mainly focus on creating musical gestures and acoustic associations under the concept of the morphology of sound textures and the mixture of various compositional techniques such as Heterophony, Micropolyphony, and Micro montage music. He employs the cross-disciplinary approaches to realize his musical creations, including traditional to contemporary classical music, computer science, and sound engineering.

His works, both instrumental and electronic music, have been awarded prestigious prizes, including the IRINO prize, ISB Composition Competition/chamber division, WerkJahr 2014 by Christoph Delz Foundation, and have also been selected by ICMC, and as a finalist by Musica Nova 2011.

Besides his activities as a composer, he has been actively engaging in a variety of musicological researches, where he develops various tools supporting and encouraging different musicological goals. In “DIPS (Digital Image Processing with Sound),” he developed a set of OpenGL and Computer Vision programs for max external objects for at Kunitachi Music collage Tokyo. In “Recorder Map” (2013-14) and “Recorderology” (2014-2016) projects, he investigated and developed the more innovative way of the presentation of instrumental research outputs which is a web application for recorder instruments and their extended playing techniques under the collaboration with Ulrike Mayer-Spohn at Forschung und Entwicklung Basel. He also participated in “Radiophonic Cultures” carried out by Weimar university, started in 2014, as a developer of the music information retrieval system. And most recently, he worked with Dr. Ellen Fallowfield developing an iOS app for the cello multiphonics using the data management system for “CelloMAPP” (2017-2018) funded by Swiss Natural Foundation and Forschung und Entwicklung Basel, Switzerland.

He received his bachelor of arts degree from Kunitachi College of Music, Tokyo, Japan, in 2009 and M.A(2011) and MASP(2013) of music composition in Basel Musik-Akademie der Stadt Basel. He completed his Ph.D. at CATOLICA Porto University in Technology of Art and Basel Musik-Akademie in 2018. The title of his dissertation is “The Development of Corpus-Based Computer-Assisted Composition Program and its Application for Instrumental Music Composition.” He studied composition and computer music with Professors Takayuki Rai, and Erik Oña, contemporary piano with Satoko Inoue, and computer programming with Shu Matsuda.