The NTT DOCOMO Group Plays Authentic Orchestral Music Supervised by a Cannes Award-Winning Sound Design Team! DOCOMO Boléro

Using vegetables, bicycles, drones, and Wonder Core® Smart machines as instruments, 80 employees in total weave their companies’ “sounds” into a harmony titled:
DOCOMO Boléro

The video available online from Friday, July 8, 2016
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVgZb6OAmKk

DOCOMO Bolero Video image (Photo: Business Wire)

TOKYO--()--NTT DOCOMO, Inc. (“DOCOMO”; Head Office: Chiyoda, Tokyo) has group companies that provide services and online content connected to diverse aspects of everyday life that range from food and health to learning, music, and fashion. DOCOMO works with these companies in different sectors to promote group-wide projects to offer unprecedented products and services designed to not only make customers’ life easier, but offer emotional value.
We liken the synergies the DOCOMO Group generates to the famous classical music piece Boléro that contains depth created by sounds of different musical instruments. In this project, we organized an orchestra that consisted of 80 employees in total from 15 major companies in the DOCOMO Group. These employees played Boléro using “items” connected with their companies’ services under the baton of Kazuhiro Yoshizawa, DOCOMO’s new president who just assumed the post in June 2016.
Yoshiyasu Ichikawa and Invisible Design Lab worked on sound production. Mr. Ichikawa is a composer and lyricist who has written numerous hit songs; Invisible Design Lab is a music production company that has won a Cannes Lion. Their collaboration created this miraculous piece of orchestral music.
We hope you will enjoy DOCOMO Boléro played by the DOCOMO Group’s magical orchestra.
The famous piece Boléro opens with a snare drum beat, then one instrumental sound joins after another toward the splendid ending.
The first player in the DOCOMO Group’s magical orchestra is from ABC Cooking Studio Co., Ltd. She taps out a fast and steady rhythm with two kitchen knives instead of snare drum sticks. Then the player from Radishbo-ya CO., Ltd plays a mellifluous melody with a vegetable flute made of a carrot and asparagus; those from Oak Lawn Marketing Inc. utter beautiful voices as they exercise on Wonder Core® Smart machines; and all the other players contribute sounds that symbolize their companies to create the symphony of DOCOMO Boléro.
We know you have lots of questions about the “sounds”: What type of unique sounds are we talking about? Which companies make these sounds? Do the sounds really succeed in playing Boléro?
Our goal as a corporate group is to offer considerable value to customers by generating synergies between different features of companies in the DOCOMO Group, just as Boléro is created with synergies between different instrumental sounds. We hope the video conveys our commitment to all the efforts we make to achieve the goal.

Story behind the Video

The uniqueness of instruments that played DOCOMO Boléro caused difficulties that a normal orchestra would never have to deal with. The vegetable flute made of a carrot and asparagus began to wither and discolor during the filming, so we had to make a “vegetable change,” instead of a “tape change,” over and over. Tuning the instruments was also a hard part; we had to continue getting the instruments ready while the shooting went on. The player who bit into a cucumber to make a unique sound ended up eating so many cucumbers in a number of takes that he almost retired before the filming ended. “I can’t eat any more cucumbers!” he said.
The players from docomo Healthcare, Inc. marched rhythmically in place, and those from DOCOMO BIKESHARE, INC., kept pedaling bicycles. They groaned with exhaustion after the end of the shoot: “We never thought being filmed as orchestral players would require this much stamina.”
We hope you will enjoy all these “sounds” in DOCOMO Boléro created in all the takes.

Comment by President Yoshizawa

Maurice Ravel’s Boléro is one of my favorite orchestral pieces, so I held the baton with all my heart.
The DOCOMO Group works in solidarity to continue offering our customers “Ever-Improving Value.”
I hope this video helps customers see and feel our Group’s solidarity.

Contacts

ANTIL, Inc.
Hayato Iijima, +81-3-5572-6063
docomo_bolero@vectorinc.co.jp
FAX: +81-3-6674-2730

Contacts

ANTIL, Inc.
Hayato Iijima, +81-3-5572-6063
docomo_bolero@vectorinc.co.jp
FAX: +81-3-6674-2730