Coppice was founded by Noé Cuéllar and Joseph Kramer in Chicago in 2009, as an inquiry into the capture and generation of music and its relationship to its physical sources.

Its compound studies include Bellows & Electronics (prepared pump organs, shruti boxes, and tape processors) between 2009–2014, and Physical Modeling & Modular Syntheses between 2014–2018; focusing on the interactions between direct and reproduced sound, and the perceptual links between original and emulated sources, respectively.

Its third study in Phonography & Fiction (in progress since 2018) scrutinizes the dynamics between its previous two studies, and their relationship to architecture and time: the acoustic preservation and obsolescence of the Yerkes Observatory’s refractor and reflector telescopes in Williams Bay being the locus of investigation.

With sustained interest in sound’s capacity to cross domains, Coppice crafts pathways between music and technology in a cross-disciplinary language, resulting in work that is an overarching documentation of experimental music in-formation. Operating in cycles of instrument construction and modification, recordings, and live presentations, its productions incorporate sound design, sculpture, installation, software, images, and video.

Soft Crown Transparencies

Soft Crown Transparencies is a ‘navigable composition for software’ that repositions the listener in a new type of active listening. It provides coordinates for engaging shifts of vantage point (as all sound layers develop in time) through a navigable vertical axis on the screen. Multiple sectors are accessible for close listening of different points of the interior of the prepared pump organ and of the multiple generations of tape processes.

Soft Crown Transparencies isn’t a game or a tool. It invites the listener to figure a porous journey through a listening format that they can intersect as the music unfolds – to obtain finer details of the music’s materialities and to localize additional audio not found in the stereo mix of Soft Crown.

Version: 1.0.1
Size: 252 MB
© 2014 Coppice

Compatibility: MacOS 10.6.8 or later
*Requires QuickTime
(Currently not available for Windows OS)

Special thank you to Mathieu Ruhlmann, and to Joey Beaver, Cole Friel, Ryan Hogg, Anthony Martinez, Tim Mena, Brad Nayman, Phil Pobanz, Brent Reardon, and Kyle Schroeder for their help in the construction of portions of the Estey Expander Module electronics present in Soft Crown.

Format: Software (MacOS 10.6.8 or later)
Label: Self-released
Artwork: Coppice
Including: Estey Expander Module, Multi-Material Filter, Prepared Pump Organ (Estey), Sphygmomanometer
Date: February 2014