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Virtual Gugak Traditional Instrument Project Captivates BTS

The term gugak (Korean national music) brings to mind a special and highly standardized image. The common perception is that the most highly skilled and refined gugak is something that can only be created by masters who have been trained according to traditional methods. Today we feature an individual who is fighting to overcome this stereotype and breathe new life into gugak. We met with composer and Seoul National University College of Music Professor Lee Don-eung, who has worked long and hard to establish a place for gugak instruments in the world of electronic music. We discussed the new directions gugak needs to take in order to survive in the modern world.

The ‘Digital Gugak Instrument Source and APP Development Project,’ conducted at the Center for Arts & Technologies at Seoul National University from 2012 to 2015 and led by Professor Lee, has recently enjoyed a fair bit of fame. The project, funded by the Korea Creative Content Agency, was thrown into the spotlight when the popular K-pop group BTS announced that they had used the digital gugak library, created through the project, for their single ‘IDOL’ released in August. We met with Professor Lee in his office at the College of Music at Seoul National University and asked him how he felt about all the attention gugak received after BTS’s album release, to which he shook his head and said, “The Center for Arts & Technologies website crashed because there was so much user traffic.”

The library used in ‘IDOL’ was a library of virtual gugak instruments (Vsti) developed for musical professionals through the project. The library features 8 gugak wind instruments, 7 string instruments, and 3 percussion instruments. For the daegeum, ajaeng, and gayageum, different sounds were digitized to represent the jeongak and sanjo playing styles, and the timbre was varied to represent the different tools used to play the instruments (e.g. the forsythia and horsetail bows used to play the ajaeng), resulting in a total of 23 virtual instrument voices. These virtual gugak instruments are fully compatible with the music production programs Kontakt, EX24, Garageband, and Live, etc. In the digitizing process, the scale and techniques for each instrument were extracted from the playing of professional musicians specializing in each respective instrument. The extracted sound was then refined to create the final product.

Professor Lee commented, “While this is no doubt a milestone, we still have a long way to go. If we are to establish a domain for gugak music in the digital music production environment, we cannot remain dependent on the limited faculties of individual developers. We need sustained management and support from state and national institutions.” Naturally, digitizing gugak and gugak instruments is more about technological development. There is also a need to achieve greater diversity and to fundamentally change the mindsets of the Korean people regarding the place of gugak in modern culture. Diversity is exactly what the virtual gugak instrument project is hoping to achieve. “For example, the sounds and techniques of the gayageum vary completely depending on the player. If we want to ensure the preservation of digitized gugak instrument sounds, we need to go beyond the representative samples of sounds we currently have from each instrument, and record sounds from more musicians.” Another project task is updating sounds in keeping with the endless changes in the digital production environment and ensuring compatibility with improved digital environments or programs. However, what’s even more important is achieving a fundamental transformation of Koreans’ cultural mindset regarding gugak. This is something that requires attention on a macroscopic scale, and is something that cannot be achieved through transient interest or one-off support efforts. Professor Lee explained how establishing strict boundaries in the gugak field limits its possibilities. “Even at the College of Music, the name ‘Department of Gugak’ establishes a boundary between Western music and gugak. However, these institutions and concepts, which have been clearly defined to allow for specialized education, unintentionally steer us toward maintaining the status quo in each genre, discouraging cross-genre exchanges and progress. Even if we try to arrange crossover concerts, too often we are constrained by the rules and frameworks we have always known.”

Professor Lee then emphasized that preserving the uniqueness of Korean culture is just as important. Professor Lee first became inspired to complete the project when he was studying overseas; at the time, he strongly felt that “Korean cultural heritage must be preserved.” Once, while he was studying in Germany, Professor Lee composed a piece for pansori (traditional Korean storytelling music), alto saxophone, and orchestra. His advisor at the time reportedly had no interest in the saxophone part, but was extremely curious about how the pansori part had been written. This led Lee to view the long-standing traditions of folk music in various countries in a new light, and caused him to recognize the need to preserve the sounds and syntax that are the identity of gugak. With the ongoing digitization of the music production environment, he realized that the digitization of gugak and gugak instruments was a must.

Professor Lee's team has a number of other notable achievements as well. They have developed a gugak symbol font for writing ‘standard gugak sheet music’ on the computer—a job that had previously been done by hand. The team also developed a gugak instrument application (app) featuring 21 gugak instruments, intended for use not only by gugak professionals but also for musical education and the general public. The application package, which implements the basic principles of gugak instrument sound production in a manner appropriate for smart devices, is significant in that it provides students and the general public with the opportunity to experience the sounds of gugak instruments, which are often prohibitively expensive. Holding their smartphone as they would the actual instrument, users can use the microphone on their phone as the mouthpiece of their virtual instrument. Gugak techniques such as ‘plucking’ are also represented, as well as gugak’s diatonic and chromatic scales. Instead of just showing the instruments on a square screen and playing their sound , the app has been engineered based on a proper understanding of each respective instrument. This means that simply playing around with the application helps users develop a fair understanding of actual gugak instruments.

※ The virtual gugak instrument sound library and gugak symbol font created by the project are available for free at the Center for Arts & Technologies at Seoul National University website (http://www.catsnu.com). The ‘Gugak’ app series for various gugak instruments is free to download and use on the Android and iOS platforms.

LEE, Ji-hyun│Correspondent│story-forest@naver.com