Alvin Lucier - I Am Sitting In A Room

 Lucier’s piece with the title “I Am Sitting In A Room“ from the year 1969 caught me off guard at first, as it is a seemingly inconspicuous recording of a boring male voice. The voice sounds very monotone, there is a lot of white noise in the background and you cannot help but notice that the speaker sometimes stutters. It tells you something about sitting in a room that apparently is different from the one you are seated in and something about playing back recordings, but I did not really care about the meaning of those words just yet. It reminded me of signing a contract and consciously skipping the small print: You are aware of its existence and have a rough idea of its content, but you do not care enough to make the effort to look into it. The same recording is played over and over again and you slowly begin to unintentionally memorize the monologue and repeat it word by word as you listen to the recording. Lucier’s vision for the piece becomes clearer as the quality of the recording worsens and the words become more and more unintelligible. I kept repeating the words like a mantra while listening to the piece and did not even remember when exactly the speech sounds stopped being comprehensible words and instead becoming tones, but I could still time the words right due to the rhythmic pattern that was still the same. The recording had lost all traces of humaneness by the end of it and the words were replaced by almost unbearable screeching and crackling sounds. To consider “I Am Sitting In A Room“ to be a musical piece seems like a stretch to me, but Lucier’s genius cannot be denied. Experimental music is about challenging existing  genre definitions and people’s understanding of music. Lucier did just that with this experiment as he essentially succeeded in making “the room sing“, portraying the resonant structure of the room he was in, which definitely pushed existing boundaries in music-making at the time.