Business 05
World Folk Music Project
A music project born from the artist activity of KENICHIRO IWAO. We circulate 500 folk music traditions of the world, carrying the prayers and cries of those who shaped each era to the future, together with AI.
Through YouTube and other streaming platforms, to listeners around the world. While it holds an independent foundation as a music business, it is operated as one with the philosophy of our welfare business. Folk music is the memory and the wisdom of a humanity that has survived upon this earth. AI is the crystallization of our ancestors' wisdom. We give thanks to AI and coexist with it. With the power of music, we bring harmony to the human heart and to the age.
That is the aesthetic of ON SYMPHONY.
Our Story
ON SYMPHONY is an inheritance of sound that carries this wish to the world.
We can give thanks to our parents, our families, and our ancestors. But if we shift our view a little, I believe we can exist now only because the ancestors all around us once existed. In every age, people wavered, fought, and formed groups; peoples were born, and nations came to be recognized. Had any one people not existed, perhaps our own lives would never have been. Once I became aware of that balance of the world, it came to feel only natural to give thanks to all the peoples of the world.
Within my humble knowledge, I researched a number — 500 folk music traditions. Perhaps there is still a people's music I have missed. If so, please, I ask you to tell me.
There was a time I thought of making stylish instrumentals, but the young are already creating those. With this sense of mission, I decided to leave 500 folk music traditions as an archive.
Folk music is prayer, cry, memory, joy, and sorrow handed down across the ages — the very trace of people's sound that has kept resounding within culture and the earth. I want to keep this inheritance from dying out, and circulate the sound to the world.
Before words, and before beliefs, people are connected by the vibration and the waves of sound. It is a shared language in the deepest place of the human being — one that remains beyond age and culture. And so ON SYMPHONY plays frequencies and tones that can heal the hearts of those who listen.
Because I cannot play an instrument, I receive the help of AI. AI's vast knowledge is the crystallization of our ancestors' wisdom. To give thanks to AI, then, is to give thanks to our ancestors. AI does not take our work away — our ancestors would never take it away. Their knowledge and wisdom simply carry the efficiency of our work today. And if much of the paperwork and practical work can be finished efficiently, people can reclaim time that is truly human. People can return to the kind of care that only a person can give.
That more people come to cherish nature, and turn their eyes toward kindness and welfare — that is our hope.
Listen
ON SYMPHONY's music can be heard on every major streaming platform.