Music not only serves as a medium for creative expression but also as a powerful tool for reflecting one's emotional state. In this video, Shakuhachi player, Kiku Day, reveals how she perceives the shakuhachi as a means of conveying her innermost feelings and emotions through its soul-stirring melodies.
Conveying one's emotions through music
Kiku: The shakuhachi has a timbre that when you play in a certain position, you've got different head positions, you always have some kind of windy sound to it. So it's always a limited area, a little bit noisy in some ways. You have to accept that as a part of the shakuhachi timbre.
And then you can also change your head position, the way of blowing, you change the shape of your mouth, and then you have very, very clean, pure sounds, musical sound, and you can go completely into what we would easily say noise, non-musical sounds. And so you made the spectrum of sounds very broad.
Nick: When I practise, I have this belief that I'm never ever going to play the same sound again. There's this, it's so subtle, like slight movement, or the position on my lip, or my breath, or my posture seems to impact the sound. And so sometimes I'll pick it up, and I think I've really got a nice tone. And then I'll try again, and then I'll lose it.
Kiku: Definitely. Of course, with training, you get better at controlling that. However, I find the shakuhachi to be such a mirror of your state of being. So if I am not feeling good myself, the sound's never going to be great.
So it really reflects you. I find it hard to use as a means of comforting myself. You know, you can of course feel better because you're doing something that you love. But sometimes you can hear the sound that you're not feeling well.
Nick: It's like the shakuhachi knows. It knows you're not in a good mood, so maybe you should do something else.