Family life, and children in general are commonly associated with chaos and unsolicited noise. This project aims at recording the everyday life in a family through a network of 16 microphones set in an apartment located on a pedestrian street, in Nørrebro, Copenhagen, in a family of four.

The technique used will be adapted to the place, capturing its acoustics in ways that won’t allow to dissociate the place from the people nor from objects used. The goal is then to recompose the resulting pieces first using virtual reality, before performing them in an empty space, with an array of 16 loudspeakers. Celebrating the musicality in everyday life, where intimacy and brutality, tensions and resolutions, power and abandonment are all intrinsically linked together – just like in music at its best. Here, mostly the timing and the use of space might differ… all things which can be corrected.

The collaboration with PhD ethnologist Gry Søbye aims at discussing the view we commonly share on family as the place where basic contingencies seemingly prevent art from happening. Or even a place where artists cannot be themselves. Placing the family (or the apartment in which the family lives) in the center of the art piece implies a potential radical change in the way we as a society consider our ties to what we could call our inner and outer lives, maybe by joining them – at least for some time.

Read more about Yan Coppier’s music projects at Studio Ovale – studio-ovale.com

Read more here about the Make Sound Residency here.