Yann Coppier

Absurd Sounds / Poetics of Sound and Sonic Dramaturgy
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Denmark (residence), France (citizenship) °1972
research interests: Sound art, Absurd sounds, Poetry, Politics, Meaning, Dramaturgy, Poetics
affiliation: The Danish National School of Performing Arts (DDSKS)
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Yann Coppier is a French sound artist, producer, performer and composer living in Copenhagen, Denmark. Besides his personal projects within the fields of music and sound art, theatre, contemporary dance or film, he has been head of the Sound Line at the Danish National School of Performing Arts (DDSKS) between 2014 and 2020, where he developed an ambitious artistic research project with support from the Danish Ministry of Culture, aiming at creating a new book of rules for sound within performing arts. He is currently a PhD candidate in artistic research in Music, at Lund University / Malmö Academy of Music, with a research project entitled "how to make the future unpredictable". Exploring new ways of composing between science and art in connection with the ESS (European Spallation Source).

 

Making extensive use of the absurd, in his research sonic dramaturgy – more than technology - occupies the primary focus, in an attempt to restore and develop the lost meaning of sounds, to educate both the branch and the audience, and to open an alternative field of artistic investigation.

 

 

 

Yann Coppier's website: www.studio-ovale.com

research

research expositions

  • Absurd Sounds (2021) author(s): Yann Coppier published in: Journal for Artistic Research
    Absurd (derived from surdus, or deaf, in Latin): that which cannot be heard or is contradictory to reason. This artistic research project questions the ways we work with sound, using a methodology derived from the absurd as a tool for innovation. The scientific roots of sound as a physical phenomenon are rarely disputed, whether by sound artists, sound designers, sound technicians, or even composers. Yet this trust in the knowledge built by acousticians, so complex and yet so simple as it mostly limits the characteristics of sound to amplitude, pitch, timbre, and envelope, might lead to an incapacity to look any other way. Have we missed, as artists, the opportunity to question the underlying axioms beneath the science of sound? This research uses a method based on the rejection — or, better, a questioning — of established rules and ideas (e.g., ‘what if silence were a building tool with which we carved music and sounds into blocks of noise?’), followed by a series of logical developments until some new technique, idea, or even form of art emerges. Such a method somehow adopts the principles behind conspiracy theories and applies them to art: absurd premises followed by logical developments. The present exposition develops a set of three case studies built between 2017 and 2020, each one answering its own absurd question: the harvesting of rare sounds made by worms (what if silence were louder than noise?); an experiment carried out on humans, by loudspeakers sitting as members of the audience (what if there were no ‘sweet spot’?); and an attempt to blur the lines between the real and the virtual, while developing new ways to document sound art (what if there were no (virtual) reality?). Cover photo for the exposition 'Absurd Sounds' by Anders Sune Berg, 2017.
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