Latent Electone

This project originated at Stanford CCRMA's Virtual Acoustics and Immersive Audio workshop, where I met a composition student who happened to be an Electone virtuoso. During a lecture, he shared a video of himself performing on the instrument—a vintage electronic organ played with both hands and feet, demanding orchestral-level coordination. While many were amused by the performance's theatrical complexity, I was captivated by something deeper: the instrument's astonishing timbral richness and expressive depth.

What struck me even more was how thoroughly the Electone has faded from contemporary musical awareness. Often mistaken for a triple keyboard or dismissed as just another organ variant, it was in fact a remarkably sophisticated orchestral instrument—capable of producing uniquely layered, dynamic textures that defined a distinct chapter of Japanese electronic music.

Inspired by 1970s composer Shigeo Sekito, whose lush Electone recordings shaped the sound of that era, I set out to preserve and reimagine this lost sonic world. Drawing on my experience contributing to the Neutone SDK, I trained a RAVE V2 neural audio model to analyze and reconstruct Electone timbres, transforming archival recordings into a responsive dataset. The result is a tool that revives and modernizes this historical sound palette—now being developed into a real-world plugin for creative exploration.