Ryuichi Sakamoto was not simply a composer. He was a philosopher of sound, an explorer of imperfection, and an artist who spent fifty years proving that true innovation is always created from the act of listening.
March 28th marked three years since his passing, an event that left a void no algorithm could ever fill. Nonetheless, Sakamoto himself gave us a fascinating paradox: he was open to artificial intelligence, but his work perhaps represents the most convincing argument against the idea that machines can replace artists.
The paradox: pro-technology, anti-imitation
During a discussion held at the MIT Media Lab with director Joichi Ito, the Japanese artist expressed a surprisingly progressive stance: “I feel basically positive about the use of artificial intelligence and would not mind if artificial intelligence systems composed music. I would praise the music they make if it was interesting”.
But here lies the crucial point of the conversation: “But I also think that the important thing would be the nature of the process and program applied in composing this music”. For Sakamoto, AI was not a threat, but a tool.
His concern was not technological, but philosophical: it does not matter who (or what) creates; what matters is how and why.
The art of imperfection: when sound becomes presence
What truly distinguishes a human artist from an algorithm? To answer this, we must understand his approach to creative process.
In a 2017 interview with The Creative Independent, Sakamoto explained his method: “Generally, I dislike the process of making music based on a blueprint or purpose or aim. If I was an architect, I would be a bad one, because I don’t like having blueprints. Of course, without blueprints, nobody knows what the building will be. But that’s exactly what I like to do. I shouldn’t know what I’m making, or what it will be. I want to make something I don’t know, and that I’ve never done or never known”.
This sentence contains the essence of his way of working: art is not a perfect formula executed mechanically, but an act of discovery. An algorithm cannot not know what it is doing. It cannot decide, on the night of a performance, to play differently because the atmosphere suggests it.
He then added: “Hopefully, for me, it’s going to be a surprise, and a new experience”.
AI generates outputs based on pre-existing patterns. Sakamoto sought the unexpected.
Async: when illness teaches one to listen to silence
His most interesting work in recent years is perhaps Async (2017), an album composed after his cancer diagnosis. In the same interview, he recounted: “I was going to make an album in 2014, the year I was diagnosed with cancer. I canceled everything, and then two years later, I started making this album, and I decided to forget everything and dump everything I had at that point”.
The album was born from an existential question: “I wanted to start from scratch, because I was the closest to death I’d been in my life. This was an important experience, and I wanted to dig into that experience”.
While artificial intelligence searches for patterns, logical connections, and predictable structures, Sakamoto sought to unlearn everything he had studied for decades.“I studied Western music for a long time, ever since I was 10 or 11. […] For this album, I tried to forget everything I’d learned”.
The sound of snow: when listening becomes a creative act
In Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (the 2017 documentary directed by Stephen Nomura Schible and distributed by Mubi), there is an emblematic scene: the musician, already marked by illness, undertakes a journey to the Arctic Circle in search of the perfect vibration. He pursues a sonic dimension that he perceives as natural and uncontaminated, following his post-Fukushima reflections on the relationship between man and technology. In a touching sequence, he attempts to capture the flow of water by immersing a microphone in order to isolate the purity of the melting ice, later transposing that acoustic material into “Async”.
Artificial intelligence can generate the rustling of snow; it can analyze frequencies, spectrums, and reverberations. But, at least as of today, it cannot feel. Because feeling is not simply recording: it is deciding that a certain resonance deserves to exist right now, at this precise moment, transforming a physical phenomenon into a poetic testimony of one’s presence in the world.
Translating the world, not imitating it
Today we are witnessing a growing phenomenon: tools like AIVA, Amper Music, or Suno AI promise to democratize musical creation. Yet, technology can also take different paths, more focused on listening to the invisible.
This is demonstrated by the relationship Ryuichi Sakamoto established with that “drowned” piano, recovered from the debris of the tsunami that struck Japan in 2011. For the Japanese master, that instrument was not simply broken, but had returned to a primordial state of nature. His challenge was not to repair it to return it to human perfection, but to transform it into a medium: a device capable of converting global seismic data in real-time into MIDI signals.
Sakamoto used technology as a tool for translation, not as a substitute. AI generates, Sakamoto transformed. Seismic data became music through a destroyed piano, a symbolic act that no algorithm can conceive on its own.
The master’s legacy
Three years after his passing, AI generates music in thirty seconds. Artists “collaborate” with algorithms. Nonetheless, listening to Async again or re-watching Coda, one realizes that Sakamoto had already won. Not against technology, but with technology, by maintaining control over the process.
His legacy is not just in his pieces, which an AI can imitate. It is in his method: he used technology as a tool, not as an excuse. And above all: he listened. To the sound of snow, the echo of an empty room, and the silence between one note and the next.
