Onkyokei
Music genre
title: "Onkyokei" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["free-improvisation", "japanese-styles-of-music", "minimal-music", "20th-century-music-genres"] description: "Music genre" topic_path: "arts" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkyokei" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0
::summary Music genre ::
::data[format=table title="Infobox music genre"]
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| name | Onkyokei |
| stylistic_origins | |
| cultural_origins | Late 1990s Japan |
| :: |
| name = Onkyokei | stylistic_origins = | cultural_origins = Late 1990s Japan | instruments = | subgenrelist = | subgenres = | fusiongenres = | local_scenes =
::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Taku_Sugimoto.jpg" caption="Taku Sugimoto, whose music is commonly associated with Onkyo" alt="Taku Sugimoto, whose music is commonly associated with Onkyo"] ::
The Onkyo music movement or Onkyokei (translation: "reverberation of sound") is a form of free improvisation, emerging from Japan in the late 1990s. Onkyō can be translated as "sound, noise, echo". Some artists commonly associated with Onkyō include Toshimaru Nakamura, Tetuzi Akiyama, Sachiko M, and Taku Sugimoto, among others.
The Off Site, a venue in Tokyo, is home to the Onkyo music movement, which is characterized by improvisation, minimalism, and "quiet noise". Onkyo improvisation "explores the fine-grained textural details of acoustic and electronic sound".
It influenced the development of electroacoustic improvisation, or EAI, a genre with which it is strongly intertwined. The transnational circulation of onkyo also influenced its representation as a form of "Japanese new music," despite claims by its authors that onkyo had little to do with Japanese cultural identity.
References
References
- Cox, Christoph and Warner, Daniel, eds. (2004). ''Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music'', p.413. {{ISBN. 0-8264-1615-2.
- John H. Haig and Andrew N. Nelson (1999). ''The Compact Nelson Japanese-English Character Dictionary'', p564. {{ISBN. 0-8048-2037-6.
- Priest, Gail (2008). ''Experimental Music: Audio Explorations in Australia'', p.28. {{ISBN. 1-921410-07-8.
- Novak, David (2010). "Playing Off Site: The Untranslation of Onkyo." ''Asian Music''41(1):36-60.
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