Alvin Lucier – “I Am Sitting in a Room”: And the Room Becomes Noisy

 

This piece of music reminds of an experiment that could take place in middle school to show the students how much such things like recording equipment, room acoustics and background noises matter in music. Lucier does not try to sing or play any instrument; he just tells the audience in a few sentences what he is about to do and what will happen. This short speech is then recorded and replayed into the empty room over and over again. The effects of these replays gave me a very unpleasant listening experience Lucier’s claim that he would “smooth out any irregularities [his] speech might have.”

The original speech without any replay was just a man talking; however, I still was intrigued because he talked about this whole happening on a meta-level which always catches my interest. The audio quality was absolutely not overwhelming, but since this whole experiment is from 1969, the recording cannot compete with microphones we have today. I was quite surprised that Lucier stuttered at some points during his speech. He probably would have never done it unprepared and without knowing his text by heart, so it probably is a speech impediment but also might be one of the irregularities he sought to smooth out.

When listening to the first replay, this it was clearly perceivable that the room acoustics were not the only factor here and the microphone and speakers also did their job. I could hear some louder crackling noises but the most prominent change was the sound of Lucier’s voice: He sounded like talking into a bucket, somehow robotic and close to C3PO from Star Wars. The second replay showed much better how his voice is going to change throughout the experiment. It loses continuously more of its prominent standing in the spectrum of sounds and blends in with the omnipresent background noise which became louder with every following replay. Together they create a sound that reminds me of a bell, but a huge one and I am standing inside of it.

Lucier’s predictions were fulfilled in the end: There was nothing left of his voice besides some traces of the rhythm. Despite the “smoothing out” rather sounded like a screeching noise, I was always interested in the next replay to see how much it will change and how far the voice can be pushed. The whole transformation into noise reminded me of modern music using indefinable sounds to create a composition; especially the genre of dubstep became very popular although the songs feature few to no analogue counterparts. Thus, Lucier invites to think about the about what differs noise from pleasant sounds we would describe as music.