“I am sitting in a room” Alvin Lucier

     Alvin Lucier’s piece “I am sitting in a room” begins with a recording of a speaking voice. It keeps repeating the same sentences over and over again until the speech becomes fully unintelligible, being replaced by high resonant frequencies and echoing.

     For me it was a very unusual experience to listen to such a composition, which emphasizes the importance of acoustics and architectural space. It was quite interesting to hear how sound waves kept reinforcing themselves to become one, which can be compared to unveiling the true core of speech we never thought about - the core that could be modified by the surrounding "container".

     Space transcending everything, the text, meaning and time - a phenomenon that is not, perhaps, very clear to us at first, but is surely somehow captivating. The intersection of a human voice with the environment of the room opens possibilities for us to question the notion of sound itself, whether or not it is purely auditory, or physical as well.

     Lussier's discovery is not only in the transfer of attention from the sounding object to the sound of the space itself, not only in the refocusing of attention from the person to the space, moving away from the bodily and personal to the purely acoustic, but also in increasing the role of the very technical process of recording and producing sound in the structure of the work. His technical means of recording turn into musical instruments. This line - the history of the existence of music, sounds, a completely material history - also continues to develop in the performance. Using the same reel-to-reel tape recorders as Lussier, that is, demonstrating rigor in observing the purity of the experiment, the creators of the performance, closer to its finale, change the means of recording and playback to modern, electronic ones.