[No. 40] Michiko Ogawa

More than twenty years have passed since I entered the workforce, and during that time, I have had many wonderful encounters and experiences that would have been unimaginable without my student life at Keio University. In particular, in 2005, I was honored by the Faculty of Science and Technology Alumni Association in recognition of my efforts in balancing both my professional career and musical activities.

Looking back, the reason I chose to study bioelectronics in Professor Minamitani's laboratory at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Science and Technology, was my original interest in the medical sciences. I was fascinated during the lab's open house to see frog legs hanging for research on muscles for artificial walkers and to learn about the joint experiments being conducted with the School of Medicine. Since there was a research theme on "vision," I initially wondered if there might also be research on "hearing," which relates to my great love, music. Unfortunately, I was not able to research "hearing" itself, but the theme Professor Minamitani gave me was "biorhythms." Rhythm is a crucial element of music, and I felt a sense of destiny and happiness in being able to research the intersection of humanity, medical sciences, engineering, and music. In fact, I went to the School of Medicine and, with a senior student, dissected rats late at night in the lab, analyzing the movement of their lymphatic vessels through imaging. It was then I noticed that the minute movements of the rats' internal organs were linked to cosmic rhythms—such as 60 seconds, 24 hours, and 30 days—that is, natural rhythms like the waxing and waning of the moon and the ebb and flow of the tides. I came to realize that living organisms are a part of nature and how profound their activities are. The lab was filled with unique and easygoing senior students and colleagues. As the only woman, I often found myself getting carried away with non-academic activities due to the comfortable atmosphere, but looking back, that too was a joyful page in my student life.

After graduation, I joined the Acoustic Research Laboratory at Matsushita Electric, where I was in charge of sound quality evaluation based on psychoacoustics and acoustical physiology, as well as new business development. In acoustical physiology, my work was a direct extension of my student research, examining how brain waves, skin potential, heart rate, and respiration change when listening to sound. Despite the busy schedule from 7 a.m. to midnight every day, I never felt it was a hardship and was filled with a sense of fulfillment from working on something I loved. It was in this environment that I developed a high-end car audio system that reproduces the "comfort of low-frequency sounds," inspired by the concepts of "womb-return instinct" and "biorhythms." These achievements in my professional life were only possible because of my student life spent researching "biorhythms."

Meanwhile, during my university years, I met fellow jazz enthusiasts and formed a band in a student club, which marked the beginning of my musical activities outside of classical music. I had been learning classical piano since I was three, but I fell in love with jazz piano because of my fondness for improvisation. The most important things in playing jazz are swing, rhythm, and soul. When I play music, I can feel that the "biorhythms" of humans resonate with the "rhythms of music," filling us with vitality. The Harlem stride style, which I specialize in, is a technique where the left hand drives the low-frequency parts with a unique sense of swing. Just as the rhythm of low-frequency sounds has been said to possess magical power since ancient Egyptian times, used even in incantations, I believe that the low frequencies of festival taiko drums and the bass drums in a jazz club also have the effect of stirring our instinctive life force.

I thought I would just continue playing jazz as a modest hobby after entering the workforce, but my supervisor at the Acoustic Research Laboratory was a jazz drummer, an honorary citizen of New Orleans, and known as a pioneer of New Orleans jazz in Japan. This encounter led to my hobby-level activities expanding rapidly. I went on a US tour in 1997 and released a CD nationwide in the US in 2003. Fortunately, this CD was chosen as No. 1 in the new release category of the critics' poll in the British specialist magazine *Jazz Journal International*.

At the 2005 Aichi Expo, I participated as a jazz pianist in a demonstration experiment for the WIDE Project, which was launched by Professor Jun Murai of Juku. The experiment involved jazz musicians in the Netherlands and Aichi performing simultaneously, with the high-definition video and audio transmitted in real time and bidirectionally via optical fiber. Using a tool called the Internet Metronome, which can control the delay caused by jamming with someone on the other side of the world, we were able to perfectly replicate the feeling of a normal live house session. I am grateful for the wonderful people I have met and for the opportunities to perform at various Mita-kai events. I feel that I am who I am today thanks to the support of Juku.

Michiko Ogawa's homepage