[Award Entry] For Your Consideration | Harry Belafonte Best Song for Social Change Award | Blue Jay Chant

For Your Consideration

“Blue Jay Chant for Subconscious Healing (Short Edition)” by Ikuyi Minat (Miyuki Tani) has been officially entered for consideration for the Harry Belafonte Best Song for Social Change Award at the GRAMMY® Awards.

The award is a special honor for songs that bring social issues to light and help move them toward change.

A Voice You Cannot Hear, Holding the Music Up

The song began with a recording of a person with a disability speaking to themselves.

Low frequencies were extracted from that recording and used as the harmonic skeleton of the song. The voice itself is not layered in as sound, so it cannot be heard. Yet the resonance that holds the whole piece up is built entirely from that person’s voice.

Dignity Does Not Require Fluency

The recording was neither corrected nor edited. The pauses and the restarts were kept as they were.

Listening back, one phrase rose to the surface. “What are you doing?” Had the recording been cleaned up, it might have disappeared.

Making a voice easier to understand is not always the same as respecting it. Dignity does not require fluency. That was the first decision made in creating this song.

Permission to use the voice was given through the person’s family.

Your Voice Matters

The message of the song is Your Voice Matters. Every voice has meaning, and everyone has the right to seek connection with someone else.

The aim is to let voices that are rarely heard in society travel the world as healing music.

Connect All That Is

In the middle of improvising, there are moments when Tani sees everything as particles and the boundary between herself and the world disappears. It is a feeling of being connected to all that is.

ONTSUBU’s words Connect all that is come from the wish to bring that feeling to people who are going through hard times. This song is one of its first forms.

Japanese · 日本語