Skip to main content

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.

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