Culture in sound

Through the study of Japanese ambient music, I have discovered its reconstruction of local identity in the tide of globalization. For instance, David Novak’s marginal circulation theory reveals its essence: the combination of Western electronic technology and Eastern spirituality. The shock of post-war modernization and the collapse of the bubble economy forced artists to rewrite culture with synthesizers – Hiroshi Yoshimura transformed the Zen temple’s dry landscape into frequency meditation, continuing a philosophical thought in the digital age.

The aesthetics of wabi-sabi permeate the cracks of sound: Haruomi Hosono deliberately retains tape noise, allowing the phase shift of electronic tracks to become a beauty of imperfection. This unconventional approach subverts the logic of technology supremacy, collapsing mechanical precision into the impermanence of Zen. Traditional scales are reborn in quantized form within modular synthesizers. When natural sounds are distorted through electronic filters, Japanese music achieves its most poetic paradox – using the grammar of globalization to narrate the vanishing landscapes of its homeland.