xyh tamura

A set of equation-first synthesizers that expose spectral structure, tuning, modulation, and feedback as editable mathematics.

Aliquoto

A pure additive synthesizer for writing spectral series as summations, envelopes, and conditionals. Its offline equation parser and phase-exact AudioWorklet support fractional, irrational, subharmonic, and drift-modulated partial ratios.

▷ open

Cella

A resonant additive synthesizer that maps custom equations onto a noise-driven resonator bank, with painted partials, Gaussian, Lorentzian, or Voigt spectral distributions, microtonal macro-detuning, and offline WAV rendering.

▷ open

Moire

A phase-modulation synthesizer that replaces box-and-wire algorithm charts with live equations, arbitrary operator graphs, feedback loops, continuous drift, and non-integer ratios.

▷ open

A WebGL simulator of light passing through frosted, fluted, or hammered glass. A progressive slice renderer combines height-map normals, distance-dependent blur, Fresnel reflection, and Beer–Lambert absorption; a Frutiger Aero interface exposes the optical model.

A hue-remapping editor that models color transforms as circle maps S¹ → S¹ on a torus. A spline with winding-degree controls drives HSL or OKLCH remapping; the tool visualizes the map on a projected torus and exports a 3D LUT.

A multi-tap delay and reverb generator that derives tap times by ray-tracing sound through a spherically symmetric graded-index atmospheric channel. Users draft trajectories, inspect a 3D wavefront, and convolve stereo audio offline with the resulting tap set.

International Conference on Timbre · presenter

A paper arguing that physical modeling does not recover a fixed timbre from mechanism. Virtual instruments construct timbral identity by selecting materials, mediation, acoustic space, bodily cues, and assumed listening competencies; each design therefore commits to a particular account of what the instrument is and which parts of its sound matter.

A wet-print simulator that deposits quantized image separations into a shared field modeled on risograph printing and suminagashi. Inks bleed, repel, fix, and misregister; .bakezuri stores the process recipe, while .urumizuri exposes the wet-state matrix for databending.

An internet-radio drift device that moves through live stations from the Radio Browser database, holding each for a randomized interval before crossfading or cutting onward. Listeners can hold or skip stations, annotate favorites, and export the session as a plain-text tasting log.

A post-MIDI composition tool and JSON notation for microtonal, polymetric, and time-based media. Its editors draw held tones, glides, pitch contours, and voice assignments; Cycla builds recursive subdivision grammars and exports .cyc time maps. TaboTa translates among beats, seconds, unordered cues, frequencies, categories, and instructions: where .scl files tune pitch, .cyc files tune time.

bio-art poem · digital interface & living punctuation

A physical and browser poem that isolates the commas in José García Villa’s “I, it, was, that, saw,” and transfers their coordinates through a stencil into mung bean sprouts on black gulaman. The germinating punctuation turns Villa’s cultivatory image into a temporary domestic response to agricultural and water anxiety around the developing 2026 El Niño; the interface lets readers fade between the source punctuation and its living transfer.

Artem Research Collective · Zine 3

An autotheoretical essay arguing that haunting is produced jointly by cultural memory and technical mediation. Filipino multo, Japanese yūrei, vaporwave, Hiroshima, U.S.–Philippine colonial memory, and Ringu show ghosts taking form through specific bodies, rituals, media systems, infrastructures, and habits of recognition; hauntotechnics names that mutual modification.

A physical gelatin poem and an interactive browser counterpart. Four clear gel strata suspend fragments of cut-up documents so depth determines which texts remain legible; the interface models the same block and lets readers change its virtual cut depth to expose lower layers.

A browser-based poem, art game, and ASCII terrarium set on a nocturnal balcony above an impossible city. WASD movement, inspectable textual specimens, movable objects, randomized vistas, changing weather, and a reactive sound engine make the terminal window behave as a small ecology.

An experimental play set in a pandemic-era biopsy room where three forgotten tumors—Glioblastoma, Meningioma, and Hematoma—become conscious and perform the roles of doctors, patients, administrators, and staff. Their biomass grows into a hospital of flesh, wires, mold, and paperwork; medical realism, bureaucratic absurdity, and body horror model how care, debt, migration, and public health assign people to institutional roles.

A family of browser instruments in which animated 2D bodies are both interface and sound source. Size, geometry, motion, contact, pressure, tension, or environmental data control each instrument's synthesis and spatialization; users play them by seeding, striking, bowing, plucking, dragging, or disturbing the simulated ecology.

short film · music composer

Composed for a short film that incorporates cleaning materials as sound sources, blending Southern California influences with modern orchestration.

Won Best Pilot Script at The Comedy Film Festival (Austin, Texas) and Official Selection at the HollyShorts Film Festival (Glendale, California).

Confound the Time: Reception in Medieval & Early Modern Studies · academic conference presentation & paper

A paper treating dungeon synth as mediated world-building rather than a revival of medieval music. Its synthetic medievalism is assembled from Norwegian black metal, American and Japanese game music, early MIDI and sound chips, fantasy literature, tabletop games, zines, pixel art, and online genre formation; the genre returns to late-twentieth-century media that had already converted the medieval into fantasy.

An interactive web timeline and timekeeper presenting a Filipino adaptation of the Japanese 72 microseasons (七十二候).

Quezon City Biennial · with Krus na Ligas residents, the LGU & UP Institute of Biology

A research-art and poetry installation that reimagines the street map of Krus na Ligas as a living plant assemblage. Roads recreated from color-inverted images of local flora, printed on acetate and suspended over a window — cyanotype-like glyphs, lightboxes, talismans, x-rays of unseen city blocks.

Long, looped ambient videos made from non-explicit transitional footage in archival gay adult media from the 1980s on — isolating rooms, hallways, pools, beds. Shifts attention from action to atmosphere, anticipation, and disappearance; on queer temporality and the ephemerality of worlds that may no longer exist.

live score for a short film by Bea Mariano · live scorer, sound artist, composer, writer, vocal performer

A live score performance integrating sound art, music, and vocal performance. Digital vocal pieces, field recordings, microsound, and ambient music.

A media art algorithmic poem generating an archipelago based on special Unicode characters and scripts of cultures with precolonial contact with Manila.

with Bea Mariano · live score

A short film and videopoem made with Bea Mariano, accompanied by my live score. It stitches the wreck of the USS Samuel B. Roberts, Manila construction sites, archival photographs, handwashing footage, microorganisms, and ocean imagery to examine how American military history remains embedded in Philippine development. The title connects cargo records, apparitions, futures made material, and manifest destiny; construction workers rotated sideways become divers moving through the same Pacific archive.

Philosophy & Digitality · academic paper

A paper analyzing artificial interaction partners through the social roles they already perform rather than as containers of hidden consciousness. AIBO, android Buddhist figures, companion robots, and LLMs show personhood emerging through communicative affordances involving affect, ritual, kinship, and care; the cases are drawn from Japanese robotics and relational accounts of personhood.

Feeling Formal · Nanyang Technological University · academic and literary/artistic presentation for a workshop on theories of emotion · researcher, participant, presenter

A study of relational accounts of emotion and personhood through Tagalog concepts of loób and kapwa as theorized largely in Metro Manila, participant interviews, literary analysis, and autoethnography. It does not treat these terms as a national Filipino ontology: Hiligaynon, for example, has no direct equivalent of kapwa. Cases involving hiyâ, kilíg, and húgot test how feeling crosses language, ethical judgment, social expectation, perception, and performance.

Saliksik-Musika II · University of the Philippines · academic and musical/artistic presentation for an international forum on music · researcher, participant, presenter

A presentation analyzing Night Bus as an intermedia song within Of Another Shore. Enjambed sung lines, asemic vocality, timbre, polytonality, ostinato, and electronic processing connect songwriting to poetic practice; references to soliranin and indolanin move rowing and work-song rhythms into urban transit without claiming to reconstruct unrecorded historical forms.

Mono by Phono · conceptualizer, event designer, performer, composer as Cyberpaean

A vaporwave listening and social gathering hosted by Mono by Phono, using archival sound, image, fashion, commercials, and film footage to organize programs around Philippine cultural memory. Sets move among 1990s OPM, 1980s ballads, Martial Law-era disco, Manila Sound, film soundtracks, and folk songs. The project later became Piyesta Plaza 1985–1995 Airwaves, an album and live audiovisual performance about Philippine pop culture, People Power and its aftermath, and the early-1990s earthquakes.

Serial digital poem with web 1.0 aesthetics.

A web-based poetic sequence about body porosity in the 2000s Philippines. A Filipino-Japanese neuroqueer speaker conducts television, dial-up internet, typhoons, political unrest, language, ghosts, floods, and voltage; electricity links nervous sensation to infrastructure, weather, media, and empire.

Atipan+ General Workshop 2025 · intern, artist-researcher, developer, translator, facilitator

A participatory "Affect Atlas" — a menstrual-awareness workshop method using storytelling, word-image mapping, and performance across Panay and Guimaras. Personal output: a critical essay and digital installation on how humor, mapping, and performance make stigmatized topics discussable while producing qualitative data.

Three textual-visual works combining hand and digital drawing, maps, diagrams, manipulated photographs, poetry, prose, and asemic writing. Police diagrams, scrapbooks, and hand-drawn cartography supply formats for recording disappearance through traces and uncertainty without converting it into death or recovery.

A web-based image processing system that reconceptualizes hue as a relational, topological medium. A user-defined anchor hue transforms colors through attraction, repulsion, inversion, compression, and expansion across the color wheel, without touching saturation or luminosity. HSL or OKLCH; CPU or GPU.

An interactive literature collection organized as a periodic table of the seven metalloids. Each element’s physical and chemical properties constrain a different work—New Weird fiction, body horror, kinetic poetry, science writing, nonfiction, or prose poetry—about objects including termite symbiosis, programmable skin, undersea cables, metallic wolves, and radioactive decay.

The British Academy · researcher

researcher

LLMs and the Patterns of Human Language Use · Denkwerkstatt Berlin · researcher, participant, presenter

An ongoing suite of electronic literature, videopoetry, docupoetry, and web art about the afterlives of disaster from a Filipino-Japanese perspective. The 1990 Luzon earthquake, 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, and 2020 Taal eruption organize works about the post-Marcos state, Japan’s Lost Decades, the pandemic-era internet, family memory, and inherited trauma. Browser poems, movable windows, archival video, blackout editing, and Windows XP interfaces make each geological rupture a point from which different historical times are read.

An LLM co-authored hypertext lyric essay presented as a continuously scrolling academic paper. Through recursive writing, footnotes, and AI-generated language, the work examines language, documents, humans, environments, and LLMs as surface-based archives shaped by bias, extraction, historical debris, and collaborative knowledge production.

A hypertext collage poem whose images and text fragments link outward to academic papers, public-domain archives, found media, recordings, forums, discarded materials, and commercial packaging. Citation is both structure and subject: the linked fragments model identity as an arrangement of references shaped by academia, plastics, capitalism, globalization, and ecological crisis.

researcher, developer · policy research

Developed the Makwela — a geographical, participatory, and photovoice-driven storytelling method with an interactive map.

The Second Congressional Commission on Education · documenter, researcher · policy research

Resident DJ, fashion designer, event coordinator, 3D mesh artist. Curated genre sets (vaporwave, exotica, electro swing, seapunk, EBM, noise) as temporary worlds — designing posters, building sets, changing skies. Plus avatar fashion impossible in physical space: dresses made from floating pearls, leaves, blobs, dandelion particles. Blender · Substance Painter

science advisor, graphic designer, composer, social media assistant

streamer, video and audio editor, music composer, social media assets · actual play TTRPG group

music composer, sound designer, sound recordist · documentary

Three-piece outfit inspired by the namesake cultivar: pants, innerwear, and outerwear. Plus a crafted iridescent cockroach ring.

short film · music composer

A narrative animation score combining gongs, bamboo instruments, and guitars with a contemporary orchestral and electronic soundtrack palette.

Film nominated for Best Director and Best Cinematography at the Las Vegas Filipino Short Film Festival 2025.

short film · music composer

A Manila interpretation of neon-noir: a synth-driven soundtrack using field recordings, noise, and rougher textures, moving away from glossy slickness toward something grimier and more unstable.

Awarded Best Short Film at the FilAm Creative Film Festival 2023. Film nominated for Best Editing and Bahaghari / LGBTQ Award at the Las Vegas Filipino Short Film Festival 2025.

Crooked Tree Records · lead singer, music composer, producer, mixing & mastering, album artist

A six-track synthpop and vaporpop EP made with Brazilian artist MASM, combining industrial music, bossa nova, trap EDM, eurodance, R&B, and minimalism through deliberately degraded playback. I co-wrote, sang, produced, mixed, mastered, and designed the album art, combining 3D and vector graphics with paper, VHS, and digital damage.

Re.Doubt 2 · Belfort and Bastion Publishing · contributing author · fiction

High Chair, Issue 16 · contributing author · poetry

keyboards, secondary vocals, arrangement

Filipino Freethinkers · contributing author · non-fiction, science writing

Filipino Freethinkers · music composer · introduction music

music composer & glass harp performer · concert with audiovisual sections

Music composed from non-human nature sounds.

Asian Composer's League

Instrumental electronic music based on simple waveforms, Philippine gongs, and vertical composition.