Alvin Lucier I Am Sitting in A Room (1970)
Introduced by James G. R. Cronin
Composer John Cage’s 4’ 33” (1952), a “performance” of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, is recognised as “haunting” the late twentieth century soundscape. In 4’ 33” the incidental shuffling and coughs of the audience breaks the silence. This is the “music” of the piece. For Cage, there is no such thing as absolute silence. It is a relative phenomenon. John Cage’s pervasive philosophical intent marked a departure point for a recent symposium of noise and silence hosted by the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, in December 2008 at which David Toop spoke. At the symposium’s opening, Alvin Lucier’s sound piece, I Am Sitting in A Room (1970), was played. Lucier’s compositions explore the physicality of sound moving in space (Toop, 2005, pp. 66, 173).
Full text
I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.
In Lucier’s I Am Sitting in A Room, the composer, recorded himself narrating a text, and then played the recording back into the room, re-recording it. The new recording was then played back and re-recorded, and this process was repeated until eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself (Lucier, 1995, pp. 86-95, 312, 314). For Lucier, the climactic point is when “speech goes from intelligibility to unintelligibility, or from words to music. What’s beautiful”, says Lucier, “is that this point is different for each listener; it’s kind of a sliding fulcrum on a moveable time scale” (Lucier, 1995, pp. 92, 94).
References
Lucier, A. (1969). I am sitting in a room. (original recording)
Retrieved January 11, 2009 from http://www.ubu.com/sound/lucier.html
Lucier, A. (1995). Reflections: Interviews, scores, writings 1965-1994. MusikTexte:
Köln.
Toop, D. (2005) Haunted weather: Music, silence and memory. Serpent’s tail:
London.
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