Assignment 3: Taiko Lisa Ji

Because I changed majors to information science in my sophomore year here, I am for the most part busy with making sure I take all my required classes. This gives me time for only one other campus activity, and that is being a member of Cornell’s taiko (Japanese drumming) team. As a performance team, our task (and goal) is to impress our audiences and spread awareness of this not-so-well-known art.

In order to carry out this task, we meet often to practice and learn new songs. Besides just a couple members, most of our team did not have any prior experience with playing taiko before joining the team. So as a cognitive system, one of the things we spend a lot of time on is forming the representations – songs – that we will coordinate on. Taiko traditionally has no written music, so this is achieved by having the musical director, our one member that has extensive experience and determines what songs we learn, play the song line by line while we repeat the beats and memorize them.

While the representations themselves could be committed to memory individually, coordinating transformations is what we have hours of practice a week for. In order for us to sound musically competent as a group, we practice the songs over and over again, making our notes more precise and critiquing each other on form. Over time, we change the representation of each song in everyone’s memory to one that manifests more uniformly across the entire team. Things like dynamics, timing, appearance, all contribute to making our performance more memorable.

This task is clearly tightly coupled. For everyone to develop the same timing and similar form, we have to be able to see and hear each other very clearly, while concentrating on producing the notes of the song. It’s nearly impossible to achieve this without all being in the same room and practicing at the same time.