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Alvin Lucier – I am Sitting in a Room

 

“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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