Making suno e tomo mi

March 27, 2025

As usual, a little bit of context, because this song is in toki pona: Toki Pona is a philosophical artistic constructed language created by Sonja Lang known for its small vocabulary, simplicity, and ease of acquisition.

Here’s the Youtube video:

This is an a cappella cover of 部屋に照らされた光 by にほしか. The original song seems to be the apex of the producer’s career, since they had to milk this particular song by putting out a one year anniversary remix, which I didn’t really know was a thing until recently. The song itself is actually somewhat intriguing, though, as it originally features a test paper like what would be seen in a Japanese primary school (what else would it be? I can’t imagine being asked to write about my summer break but not, say, Shakespeare after primary school), while the essay itself mentions “the last summer break of high school”. The essay is supposedly written by the producer’s friend.

The music was fairly straightforward, certainly more straightforward than Jacob Collier’s music. I don’t think this qualifies as SATB, and this probably leans more towards four-part barbershop. The harmony was written across a couple of days, despite the chord progression being fairly repetitive. While using only four parts felt somewhat limiting, some care was given to making the chords actually resolve when there is some nuance involved.

The tuning was minimal, especially on the lower parts where there is not much rhythm going on despite my attempt at adding some interest. As for mixing, apart from the usual stuff, a little bit of sidechain was put on the lower parts to give soprano a bit more headroom. Because it is all vocals, some care was also taken for the lower parts to make the base frequency stand out. The distortion-like effect just before the chorus is actually just an insanely fast vibrato that has been faded in, which was done entirely in OpenUTAU.

The video was the fun part. With help from jan Supalu (you can find out more about them, under the name No’adiah, on the “About” page), I designed a test paper in a portrait format. The design is a somewhat faithful translation of the original paper, featuring a very, very funny way to spell out the year 2019 at the top right. I wrote the entire lyrics in sitelen pona with a pencil, erased everything with GIMP, and revealed everything in synchronization with the music. Funnily enough, the red ink was done in GIMP, too. I did have a red gel pen which was unfortunately not in my room at that moment, so I decided to turn the ink red in post.

toki pona lyrics are included in the video. sitelen pona is omitted from the commentary section, because the real-world visual already syncs handwritten sitelen pona to the music. Leaning-literal English translations and English commentaries on translation are also included.

I’m excited to work on more four-part vocal projects, but for now, mi tawa.