Artist / Founder, Kuon R&D
朝比奈 幸太郎
Kotaro Asahina
Acoustics · Music · GNSS · Software · Hardware
Mastering sky and sound — a one-of-a-kind creator.
Three domains, one mind
01MUSICIAN
Musician
Piano and synthesizer — and the traditional Japanese ryūteki flute and shō.
02RECORDING
Recording engineer
Inherits Kaneda DC recording and Revox restoration, and designs his own microphones.
03SOFTWARE
Software engineer
Fast web services on the edge (Cloudflare Workers), from Next.js / React / TypeScript to iOS / Android apps. Runs his own RTK base station, building cm-precision GNSS systems.
The path
One sensibility, running through four domains
- Music
A pianist, bound for Europe
Studied ethnomusicology and became a pianist. Explored improvisation with Lindha Kallerdahl in Sweden; made an album with Achim Tang in Cologne, where Stephan Desire taught him acoustics.
- Recording
Inheriting Kaneda DC recording
Back in Japan, studied under the leading authority Akihiko Goto — directly inheriting a purity of sound, half a century in the making, unreachable by commercial equipment.
- Software
Describing the world in software
Learned C and GPS positioning from Kazuhide Kobayashi of Geosense. Builds a browser-native music platform solo — frontend, audio engine, payments and all.
- Hardware
The feel of hardware
Restores Switzerland's legendary Revox decks himself — reading boards, soldering, verifying. That touch lives in the P-86S / X-86S microphones.
Handcrafted ultra-fidelity microphones - Now · 2026
Kuon R&D
Founds Kuon R&D — uniting acoustics, software, hardware and musical art into a single platform unlike any in the world.
Kuon R&D
Past albums
noumenon
Solo piano work (2013) · with Akihiko Goto
New Continent
Album session in Cologne, Germany (rehearsal)
Angel's Piano Miniatures
A collection of piano miniatures (2019)
No sample available
Philosophy / 久遠
Art simply is, here.
Kuon R&D lives where sky and sound meet — neither can be seen, neither can be held.
Are they merely signals? Or are they works of art? That is for humankind to decide.
I, too, am one of those humans who can give a signal its intent — and it is in the freedom to move between those vantage points that I feel true art.
Kuon R&D is precisely that: one large work of art by Kotaro Asahina.
Sky and sound — what intent, what meaning do you find in each signal?
The works of Kuon R&D simply are, here.
— Kotaro Asahina