amplified string instruments (derived from the tablature of ninth-century Chinese pipa music, and a gated audio system. The work features the reading of passages from a late 10th century Chinese encyclopedia, describing various foreign places and people. Around this time, Tone became influenced by the work of East Asian Studies Scholar Shizuoka Shirakawa and his 1970 book Kanji in particular. The book ethnographically traces the development of kanji characters. Inspired by Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Tone began a process of translating kanji characters into sound. This would prove to be a rich avenue for Tone’s experimentation in sound seen in works like Musica Iconologos and Musica Simulacra. Musica Iconologos (1993) converted two poems from the Shih Ching, China’s earliest poetic anthology, into sound. Tone describes the process for producing his album Musica Iconologos as such: “first, the material source of the piece was derived from the poetic text of ancient China and each character of the text was converted into photographic images according to the ancient form of the Chinese characters which are closer to images than the modern form. I scanned the images and digitized them, thus the images were transformed simply into 0’s and 1’s. Then, I obtained histograms from the binary codes and had the computer read the histograms as sound waves; thus I got sound from the images.” For example, “Solar Eclipse in October,” a poem composed of 262 early Chinese characters was turned into half an hour of experimental, chance-driven sound. A similar method was employed for Musica Simulacra, debuted in 2003, which took the Man’yoshu collection of poems of the 7th and 8th centuries as its source material. This particular project shows Tone’s multi-disciplinary concern in that it necessitated study of the obscure grammatology of the characters used (and sometimes invented) in the writing of the Man’yoshu anthology. His collaboration with Florian Hecker, Palimpsest, also transliterated Japanese Man'yōshū poems to sound. As Tone notes, Musica Iconologos was developed specifically for the medium of compact disc. He writes, “I had received an offer to publish a CD; however, none of my pieces were suitable for recording. Certain formal elements of the pieces—spatial movement of sound, contrasting acoustic sound with amplified sound, and the use of visuals—made the pieces simply unrecordable. So I had to create something totally devoid of live performance, something that only the CD as a medium could produce.” Because the musician’s hand