Okuda Hiroko
Okuda Hiroko is the Japanese inventor and musicologist who, at the start of her career in 1980, composed the rhythm and bass preset backing tracks included in Casio's electronic keyboards. These included the "rock" rhythm, which became the ubiquitous Sleng Teng Riddim, heralded the Ragga movement, and has since underpinned hundreds of hit reggae songs. Okuda and Casio have allowed her backing-rhythm work to proliferate under a free attribution-only license, which have contributed to their popularity and widespread use. She holds more than a dozen patents in the fields of electronic musical instruments and presently  works at the intersection of electronic music and visual art. Childhood and education. Okuda, a pianist from childhood, became a fan of British rock music in middle school, and this developed into a deep interest in Jamaican reggae in the 1970s. Okuda attended a musical high school, and then Kunitachi College of Music, where she studied musicology with an emphasis on Reggae, the topic upon which she wrote her graduation thesis. While a college student in 1979, Okuda attended several of Bob Marley's concerts, on his only visit to Japan. Career. Okuda joined Casio in April 1980, immediately upon  graduation from music college. She was immediately assigned to develop six two-bar long rhythm and bass preset backing tracks which would be used on the Casiotone Casio MT-40 and Casio's other contemporaneous keyboards. The first six styles were "rock," "samba," "disco," "waltz," "swing," and "pop," and it was the "rock" style which would be made famous in Jamaican dancehalls. The process Okuda used was very much a technical one, far removed from traditional musical composition. "It was necessary to convert a musical score into code, record the code onto an ROM, and then inset the memory into a  specialized machine. Only then could you listen to the rhythm pattern you had written." Section::::"Sleng Teng" and use in popular music. The MT-40's "rock" preset, along with the keyboard's suggested 1/16 note fill for that preset, formed the basis of Wayne Smith and King Jammy's 1985 reggae hit "Under Me Sleng Teng", which has subsequently been covered nearly 500 times. This song's success is widely credited with single-handedly transitioning reggae from analog to computerized production. Okuda says that she had in mind to create a drum-and-bass line which would be easy to "toast  over, and attributes much of the success of the backing track to its simplicity, which allowed musicians to flexibly layer many types of compositions over it. Indeed, her influence soon became widespread, with her samples appearing in hip-hop and rap music, like 2 Live Crew's Reggae Joint" and then rave music, like Moby's remix of "Everybody in the Place". Although the original MT-40 was only produced for about a year, and its "rock" rhythm was retired with it, its ongoing popularity led Casio to bring it back in 2010 in their SA-46 and SA-76 keyboards, this time  under the name "MT40 Riddim". Speculation about inspiration of the "Rock" rhythm. Many people have speculated on the origins of the rhythm used by so many artists, some misattributing it to various works of British popular music of the 1970s. Okuda has variously said that it had no specific inspiration, or that it was inspired by the opening of a piece which she declined to name, but which is now widely believed to be David Bowie's "Hang On to Yourself". Present work. Okuda works in Casio's R&D Center in Hamura, in the Tokyo suburbs. Her recent work includes  real-time automated visual accompaniment for music performance, which she calls "music tapestry."