08/28/2008
Many see it as the digital musical instrument of the 21st century, but the truth is that the Tenori-on is a 16 x 16 matrix of LED buttons that acts simultaneously as a performance controller and a display, allowing anyone to play music intuitively by creating a "visible music" interface.
It provides six different performance modes of light and sound, offering wide performance versatility. These modes can also be combined and even used at the same time to achieve rich, complex musical expression.
It has layers that can be thought of as "parts of a performance" or "recording tracks." The Tenori-on has a total of 16 layers. Each layer can be assigned independent notes and voices, and they can all be played back together in sync. A complete set of 16 layers is called a block.
This instrument can store up to 16 programmed blocks (groups of 16 layers) in memory and can switch from one block to another instantly during a performance. You could, for example, create a musical composition in one block, then copy that composition into another block and modify it to create a variation of the original composition. Or you could load a number of previously created compositions into separate blocks from an SD memory card and switch between them to create variation during playback.
All this technology was designed by multimedia artist Toshio Iwai, who worked in collaboration with Yamaha; and in its short life (it was introduced in Europe at the beginning of the year and in Spain at the end of May), artists such as Kieran Hebden, Atom Heart and Robert Lippok have already declared themselves regular users of the Tenori-on in their productions; even Björk herself has used it on her latest tour, even making it part of the show.
Following the huge media and public success of its critically acclaimed launch in the United Kingdom, SAE Institute Barcelona and Yamaha Ibérica held a special session on June 13, given by Javier Amo, representative of the Music Production department of Yamaha Ibérica S.A., who demonstrated all the features, details and characteristics of the Tenori-on.