[Award Entry] For Your Consideration | Best New Age, Ambient or Chant Album | Resonate Ma

For Your Consideration

Resonate Ma (Spatial Frequencies) by Ikuyi Minat (Miyuki Tani) has been officially entered for consideration in three categories at the GRAMMY® Awards.

Best New Age, Ambient or Chant Album
Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical
Best Album Cover

Letting Ma Resonate

The Japanese word ma refers to the time and space between sounds. It is not empty silence. It is the place where sounds form relationships and resonance is born.

Resonate Ma is an album built around this idea. Rather than focusing on the sounds themselves, it listens to what happens between them.

Sound as Particles

As the name ONTSUBU (“sound particles”) suggests, Miyuki Tani has studied sound as individual particles and how they behave.

This album is a work of frequencies created from that particle theory of sound. Sound particles overlap, drift apart and open up ma, until together they become a single resonance.

Spatial Frequencies

The subtitle Spatial Frequencies reflects the idea of placing frequencies within space.

The album was mixed in multichannel. Where each sound comes from, which direction it spreads and where it dissolves were all designed as part of the placement of frequencies. The entry for Best Engineered Album puts this spatial sound design forward for consideration.

The Cover, Through Stained Glass

The cover was designed by Miyuki Tani from a close-up photograph of stained glass.

Light passes through colored glass, blurs and blends. The image expresses Japanese ma and the West, the Earth and the cosmos, and the viscosity of sound. Sound does not only travel straight through the air. It slowly bleeds, lingers and changes shape. The cover captures that texture in a single image.

Japanese · 日本語