Skip to main content

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.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Listening Report on John Oswald: Plexure

 Sarah Kumar Dr. Bernd Herzogenrath The Future of (American) Music 06 Mar. 2023 Listening Report on John Oswald: Plexure According to John Oswald, “[a] plunderphone is a recognizable sonic quote, using the actual sound of something familiar which has already been recorded” (Lecture Slides 18). However, only if the source stays recognizable can it be called plunderphonics. In his album Plexure , several songs are played back and mixed together, thus creating a new sound. This is interesting because while the excerpts of songs that are used are recognizable or at least sound familiar to some degree, played backwards and mashed up as they are in Plexure , they create a new sound. Like on the cover of the album, on which a collage making up a man can be seen, the mixing of different songs played backwards gives a new feeling to something known. The way the songs are mixed makes them unintelligible. The meaning of the words of the original recordings are not able to be compr...
Post a Comment
Read more

William Basinski – The Disintegration Loops III

  The Disintegration Loops is a quartet of albums published in 2002 and 2003 by American avant-garde composer William Basinski. The pieces are made up of tape loop recordings that were played over time, with noise and crackles rising as the tape deteriorated. Basinski noticed this effect when attempting to convert his older recordings to digital format. The completion of the recordings coincided with the September 11, 2001 events, which Basinski witnessed and adds a deeper meaning to the composition. The composition is fascinating in many ways and makes the listener lose track of time. The tape loop recording had a very calming effect on me and put me in a trance-like state when I listened to it in its entirety. The tape loop is really soothing, so much so that I didn't even notice the loss of quality when I first listened to it. It makes you forget about time and allows you to really get into the piece capturing the calmness it exudes. You forget or don't really notice how i...
Post a Comment
Read more

John Cage – Inlets

  This does not sound like music to me. Depending on the interpretation of different players or performers, this piece will always sound different. In this case, it sounds to me like someone is walking through a cave with water at the bottom, dragging their feet through it. Sometimes it sounds like water in a toilet bowl, especially when we hear the water in a bigger shell being swished around. These sounds are relaxing in the background, it is like a gentle stream of water. I just wonder what went through the head of the composer while writing this piece. But I guess he had some experimental ideas that are interesting to try out. Those shells are quite pretty, I have never seen such big ones that are not broken. I was surprised when something else happened towards the end of the piece. That tone which came out of the one shell was so clear, it sounded like a trumpet. I didn’t know that shells can sound like that. It was quite beautiful. It was a nice way to end the piece. I di...
Post a Comment
Read more