Alvin Lucier: Sitting in a Room – The Sound of Pipes and Wind

In Alvin Lucier’s “Sitting in a room”, which was created in 1969, Lucier records his own voice reading out loud what he is going to do in the recording. This text is at the same time already the lyrics for his recording. He explains that he is sitting in a room, recording his voice and once he has done his first recording, he will play this recording into the room over and over while recording it again. This creates a cycle he is going to follow until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves. He will do this until any signs of his speech are destroyed, and the only sounds that remain are the natural resonant frequencies of the room. 

 

When I was listening to the recording for the first time, I did not really know what to expect. It sounded like an interesting idea and I was curious how the outcome of Lucier’s “experiment” would sound like. The original recording takes about one minute and 40 seconds. During the first listening, I already noticed that there was much background noise so that I asked myself how long it would take for Lucier’s voice to not be recognizable anymore. Although Lucier is stuttering at some points of his speech, his voice creates some kind of rhythm for me, especially after listening to the repetitions a few times. 

After already a few repetitions, I noticed that his voice was getting quite unclear and heard to understand. The background noise was getting more present and gave his voice a metallic touch. This metallic touch created the image of a robot repeating the lyrics in my head. Moreover, in my head, it felt like the device of which the audio is played of is somehow broken which is why one could not understand the text anymore. Nevertheless, I knew that this was due to the frequencies of the room. After a while, a specific scenery came up in my head which showed a mysterious island full of pipes and wind blowing through the pipes. 

Once I could not understand anything anymore, I felt like the sounds and the somehow existing rhythm put me in a form of trance. At this point, I could not come up with any new thoughts concerning the piece. I was just listening to it, waiting for it to stop again since nothing changed anymore. After a few seconds of hearing just crackling noises, the piece had finally ended.

 

When it comes to the question whether I would consider “Sitting in a room” music, I would rather say that it feels more like a physical experiment to me. It sounded interesting to me at first, but after a while, it became quite challenging for me to listen to it. All in all, I can now say that I do not like how the room sounds and that I was relieved when the piece ended after 15 minutes.