Music and technology

Beginning with a casette tape recorder when he was nin, Yo-Yo Ma (shown at right with recording specialists -- click to enlarge) has creatively used technology to improve his performances. He noticed that the tempo of his pieces sounds different depending on where the audience is located -- he learned this by putting microphones in different places in the venues where he played.

Recently he has started integrating live performance with digital images, voices and instrumentals.

Mr. Umezaki [a music and voice instructor at McGill University and a recent collaborator with Mr. Ma and his Silk Road music group] came across an 18th-century Chinese scroll that depicted an Imperial voyage to China's south. Because the scroll is about 30 feet long, it can never all be displayed at once.

Inspired, the [Silk Road] group not only wrote a 30-minute musical piece but also digitized important sections of the scroll. At a performance at Carnegie Hall this month, those images were displayed in motion and in harmony with the music. The spell was broken only when the big letters "DVD'' inadvertently appeared on the screen at the end, prompting knowing laughter from the audience.

Read the whole piece.