Yann Coppier

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.

Making extensive use of the absurd, in his research sonic dramaturgy 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. Working indifferently with instruments, field recording, synthesis or programming, he has more recently been focusing on original creative strategies regarding spatialisation within sound art.

His past interventions on absurd sounds, electronic composition and original sound creation include among others IRCAM (La Semaine du Son), Cité des Sciences, SAE Institute Paris; The Danish Royal Academy of Music, Rytmisk Konservatorium, Den Danske Film Skole, The Royal Academy of Electronic Music, Sonic College (Denmark); Elektron Musik Studion EMS, Inter Arts Center (Sweden); Punkt seminar, KHIO(Norway).

He has released a dozen records, solo and through various collaborations, and has performed all over Europe with projects ranging from sound installations, theatre plays, choreographies or music of various kinds. His musical projects, among which -i snor (solo) and WHOURKR (with Igorrr), focus on sound qualities within the experimental field while questioning the role of the composer, of the sound artist / designer, of the performer and even of the audience.

In 2021 he released a massive publication in Journal For Artistic Research (JAR) about "Absurd Sounds", focusing on a creative method based on ideas rather than technology. There he develops 3 case studies, each one answering its own absurd question: the harvesting of rare sounds made by worms (what if silence was louder than noise?); an experiment made on humans by 120 loudspeakers sitting as members of the audience (what if there was 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 was no (virtual) reality?).

• Website: https://studio-ovale.com/
• Music: https://yanncoppier.bandcamp.com/
• Publication: https://jar-online.net/en/exposition/abstract/absurd-sounds