On Stage Design Indaba 2019: Yuri Suzuki

Yuri Suzuki has always had a love for music but because of his dyslexia, Suzuki found it incredibly difficult to read music notation. The sound designer and Pentagram partner shared more about his experiences growing up with the learning disorder and how it's shaped his career at Design Indaba Conference 2019.

“I used to be in a band when I was a teenager and I loved it at the time but I was fired because I couldn’t read any musical score. So, it drove me to sort of creating a musical notation even dyslexic people would understand," he explains. In 2013 Suzuki designed Ototo, a musical kit that is able to turn almost anything into a musical instrument.

Ototo is quite a simple structure. The circuit board of the kit is made up of various sounds. Connecting the circuit board to various conducting materials, such as water, plants, etc allows you to play back sound, thereby creating musical instruments out of pretty much anything.