Why is modern society reducing the space of perception?

“Percept” refers to the content that is perceived through sensation.

“Perception” refers to the entire process through which a human being apprehends and interprets the world.

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When I am engaged in instrument making, there are moments when the body seems to already know the answer. Decisions such as “this feels right” or “this will improve the sound” arise before conscious reasoning takes place.

This is not a matter of blind intuition. Rather, it feels closer to a form of embodied knowledge and tacit knowledge in which accumulated experience begins to focus and converge toward a particular direction.

There are moments during instrument making when measurement stops being sufficient.

My hands begin responding instead to resistance, density, humidity, and vibration.

Sometimes I cannot fully explain why a certain adjustment feels correct, yet the body recognizes a coherence before language does.

In contemporary culture, increasingly shaped by AI systems and measurable outputs, perception itself is being reorganized around optimization.

In an age increasingly shaped by AI-generated outputs, this pre-verbal layer of perception may be becoming more critical than ever.

In contemporary culture, music has fundamentally changed. With AI, music can now be generated instantly; as formal structures, compositions are no longer rare. However, something essential is missing.

What is missing is the quality of perception that emerges from the intersection of body, sensation, environment, experience, and context.

This layer of lived perception is what can be called a percept—something fundamentally different from mere data or information.

・What do performers seek in their instruments?

・What do listeners seek in performance?

・What does society seek in music itself?

Human beings do not perceive sound as pure physical data. Perception is always shaped by embodied experience, spatial awareness, temporal continuity, memory, and expectation.

Yet contemporary society continues to prioritize noise reduction, standardization, commodification, and optimization. Efficiency and reproducibility have increased dramatically, but this has not necessarily led to a corresponding increase in richness of experience.

We are surrounded by an excess of information, yet the depth of perception appears to be diminishing.

What, then, is richness?

Richness may arise from the “gaps” within perception itself.

What happens when perception itself becomes optimized?

It is through imperfection, ambiguity, fluctuation, and asymmetry—elements that escape measurement and control—that human perception becomes activated and expanded.

A slightly irregular form often leaves a deeper impression than a perfectly symmetrical one. Historical violins, and even the subtle asymmetries found in a scroll, can be understood in this way.

Here, we encounter a problem that cannot be fully addressed through measurable parameters alone.

A performer seeks in an instrument a means of extending their own perception.

A listener seeks in performance the emergence of a world that has not yet been fully articulated.

And society, perhaps unconsciously, seeks in music something that resists full optimization.

Music is not merely stimulus.

Although it can generate strong emotional responses, stimulus alone does not sustain perception.

Stimulus is momentary; it fades like foam.

In contrast, art as percept operates on the structure of perception itself.

What matters, then, is not only what is expressed, but what kind of perception is brought into being.

This question is not limited to music.

Across education, AI, urban design, and algorithmic systems, the increasing dominance of measurable parameters is gradually reducing the “space” within perception.

As a result, the world becomes more precise, but at the same time, less perceptible.

Thus, the question we now face is not what can be measured, but what human beings perceive as richness.

Instrument making can be understood as one practice that engages with this question.

It is not only the act of producing sound, but also the act of designing human perception itself.

The subtle irregularities of wood, the shading of varnish, temporal change, and imperfect symmetry are not mere decoration. They function as conditions through which perception is activated.

Richness may not be a matter of information quantity, but rather of how open perception is allowed to be.

What is required, then, is the continuous and careful observation of one’s own perceptual experience.