Specimen Music

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 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.

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Legend of Passing Time with Instruments and Captions

Legend of Passing Time with Instruments and Captions is an abridged account of Coppice’s custom and modified instrumentation since 2009. Ranging from handheld objects and digital models to actual and simulated architectures, Coppice’s instrumentation is overviewed as an evolving idea. Presented from within the documentary space of the now defunct Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, Coppice captions the passing of time and the shapeshifting music within it.

Presented in 2021 for the 10th International Scientific Meeting for Sound, Music, and Musical Instrument Studies in Gardunha, Portugal; and for the Sound Studies Lab at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

This presentation is an annex to Coppice’s script for audio paper Stewardship to Obsolescence and Preservation: Listening to Specimen Music through Yerkes Observatory’s Refractor and Reflector Telescopes.

Format: Script and audio paper for live audiovisual presentation
Artwork: Coppice, with images from the University of Chicago Photographic Archive of the Yerkes Observatory, including drawings by astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard.
Date: August 2021