“I
am Sitting in a Room” is an experimental musical composition created with the
recording and playback of the short text read by Alvin Lucier. In the first
three minutes, the repetition of the text is quite clear to my ear, while with
the echo in the room’s acoustic that the piece was recorded, the words sound as
if he is slowing down. In addition, the repetition of the first recording
brings his stuttering of some consonants forward. Following three minutes and
about twenty seconds, the echo becomes moderately noticeable; however, the text
is still understandable. With the increasing clanging formulated by the
iteration of the playback, Lucier’s voice becomes unrecognizable while the
rhythm remains unchanged.
In
the last five minutes of the piece, the voice and the spoken words get caught
up into the unintelligible and hypnotic resonance. The evolution of the sound
texture from the recording of a short text to a degrading rhythm is quite
impressive. Through the instrumentality of the last five minutes, I felt like I
was going through a hypnotic trance, losing the sense of the room that I was in
and floating in outer space with only the clanging sound of the frequencies in
my ear.
Lastly,
it reminded me a lot of “d|p III” by William Basinski, which is composed of
tape loop recordings, creating an ambient work eventually. Even though the
techniques are different from each other, the deterioration of the tape
affecting the final sound in Basinski’s work is very much similar to that of
Lucier’s in terms of the repetition and the feelings that the ambient sounds
evoked in me.
All
in all, "I am Sitting in a Room" is a highly experimental and
innovative piece of music made by recording only human voices while reading a
text. The fact that the work was created by using such minimal elements turning
into something that appeals to the listener only with the content of the text,
almost breaking the fourth wall, is one of the things that makes it unique for
its time. The ambient and hypnotizing sound created by just a recording device
and repeated playback gives the effect of a meditation that takes you away from
your environment.
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