Skillful hands playing plastic cup instruments on the table, followed with the strum of the guitar and clapping hands formed harmonic gestures and sounds. The vocalist sang a song accompanied by a simple yet unique rhyme. This unique orchestra amazed the audience to applause.

This debut was made by students belonging to Cup Coustic community of the Department of Curriculum and Education Technology (DCET), Yogyakarta State University (YSU) on Wednesday (23/3) in a local TV program. Risqi Nuruz Syifa, the coordinator of Cup Coustic, said the Cup Coustic formation began at Freshmen Initiation Night of FE YSU Year 2014. “At that time, we were invited to put in performing arts” she added. “Our senior requested us to perform a different kind of music performance”. That made us challenged to create musical arrangement using plastic cups accompanied by guitar.

One of Cup Coustic’s members, Imam Abdul Al Azhari shared the plastic cups they use must be a set of 8 cups. “The cups have to be homogeneous that no cups make off-key sound” Iman told, “therefore, we always buy one set of plastic cups”. He ascertained the cups used for tuning have to be identical as for resulting in harmonic. Idwar Aziz Raf Sanjani also revealed another problem faced by Cup Coustic’s other than the cups: concentration skill. Similar to Saman dance from Aceh that combines dance with claps, playing music using cups needs to concentrate between hitting a cup to the table, putting it, clapping, hitting it again and moving it. He said “It needs full concentration to do that”.

Cup Coustic practices once a week. However, they will practice more if they are going to perform in an event. Their unique music community draws the attention of other DCET students. The faculty officials are also interested in this community by inviting Cup Coustic to perform in their events, such as graduation. Recently, Cup Coustic was also invited to perform in YSU Student Executive Board open house, Education Technology Festival by Museum Pendidikan Indonesia, and an event in Fort Vredeburg Museum. (Dedy)