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Listening Report on Alvin Lucier’s Sitting in a Room

 

Sarah Kumar

Dr. Bernd Herzogenrath

The Future of (American) Music

05 Mar. 2023

Listening Report on Alvin Lucier’s Sitting in a Room

            Sitting in a Room is a recording of Alvin Lucier’s speech in which he shortly talks about his intent behind it. He is recording himself and playing his voice into the same room over and over again. In his speech, he says that “any semblance” of it “with perhaps the exception of rhythm is destroyed” (Sitting in a Room 0:54). This is not yet observable in the first minutes of the recording; however, as the recording progresses, so do the overlays of speech over speech – voice over voice. The static keeps growing and becoming louder and the voice hollower and more mechanic sounding. The stutter that was so easily recognizable in the beginning seems to have vanished, or rather, been engulfed, as the recording progresses.

            In his speech, Lucier said that this recording was “an act to smooth out any irregularities his speech might have” (1:38). As the recording progresses and keeps overlaying Lucier’s voice on top of itself, his stutter keeps becoming less recognizable. His voice seems to amplify itself through those overlays. Furthermore, if before there was discernable meaning to what his speech said, the more his recorded voice is played on top of the previously recorded version, the more the speech ceases to hold any meaning at all. Not only does the stutter vanish, but also the meaning of the speech. Lucier’s voice then merely becomes part of the space it was recorded in, with speech being used to articulate it.

            I think that it is pretty interesting how silence has its own sound. In this case, though our ears might not pick it up at first, the room Lucier’s voice had been recorded in a room with different frequencies of sound either due to the recording machine or the timbre of Lucier’s voice. If these recorded sounds are overlayed on top of each other, they build up this space Lucier, his voice, and his recorder occupy, and simply sound like what I would imagine silent space to sound like. If I recorded myself going about my day in my room and kept overlaying the recorded version of the recorded version on top of each other, I would start hearing the “natural frequencies of the room” as I would normally not be able to hear them (1:05). In this way, the acoustic phenomenon of the room can be heard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

Herzogenrath, Bernd. Sitting in a Room (1969). Google Drive – Reader FUTURE OF MUSIC, 14 Dec. 2022, https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1QDtXfi9NKoOUnvw7RedhUQ2O2BfQp8lA. Accessed 5 Mar. 2023.

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