Alvin Lucier: American Experimental Music and the Space-and-Time-Continuum

 

To me, the work of the American experimental musician, Alvin Lucier, raises not only questions of a musical-ontological nature, or about the sole connex of music and space, but also deals with and crucially deconstructs our perception of space and time itself. Through the endless feedback loop of his piece "I am sitting in a Room" for example, Lucier motivates the listener to ponder on the spatial circumstance of the composition, as well as on the concept of time: what is time, how long is time, and is there a temporal beginning and end at all, or is everything just a perpetual motion machine in the vacuum of infinity?

The oeuvre plays on this note, when Lucier says “I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now” [emphasis added]. I see this as a presumptuous anticipation that in itself can never be fully true, as the listener could be sitting in the same room some time after the recording or even simultaneously at the recording or performance site. Hence, I regard this juxtaposition as a means of Lucier to direct the listener’s attention towards our contemporary conception of room as a societal perception of an architectural space, that could or should be reevaluated and extended.

I think that it is fascinating to think about this sound installation as a technique to exploit the sound of room and space, and its resonant frequencies, and would be curious to hear more soundscapes of different rooms in order to be able to compare their sonic similarities or differences. Follow-up questions for me would be: how do oscillations, sine waves or areal resonances sound like (in its pure form)? How can such subtle sound phenomena be made audible, and how are sounds influenced by space or does space generate them in the first place?

Furthermore, I feel like Lucier’s “I am sitting in a Room” is a deeply philosophical piece, that sets in motion a thought process about human senses, too, and how we can approach them scientifically, humanistically, and culturally. This posits his work right at the border between the human concept of music and acoustics, as an exploration of acoustic phenomena, philosophical notions of time and space, and human sensibility.

In addition, in being such a self-contained piece of art, the piece captures the immanent aesthetics of sounds, regardless of cultural and contemporary expectations of what a good song is supposed to sound like. It is really an extension of John Cage’s perspective on sound, where music is about revealing sounds that are always there and have always been there but have never been paid attention to. By hearing them or listening to them, we can create new realms of music culture and maybe even incorporate areal sounds within architectural building plans in the future, without having to rely on artificially composed music for public spaces.