Alvin Lucier - I am sitting in a room

Alvin Lucier’s 1969 piece “I am sitting in a room” starts as a rather simple recording of a man speaking. The preconceived text he cites out loud literally describes what the listener is about to experience: he records the sound of his speaking voice and plays it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves. 

 

The piece consists of several playback repetitions; for that reason, I will try to arrange the cycles into groups: (1) The first 5 cycles (00:00 – 06:45) sound as though an auditory illusion is created by altering the speaker's position in relation to the microphone. Each repetition sounds as though the speaker moved a little further away, which in some way also sounds as if the location was changed from a small room with clear acoustic into i.e., a reverberant hallway. (2) Cycles 6 to 12 (06:46 – 16:28) mark the transition from comprehensible speech to the abstract resemblance of speech. With each cycle the text becomes less and less intelligible, thus strikingly introducing the listener more and more to the resonances and a whole new perspective on sound. In my opinion, loop 12 is the last mostly intelligible loop. (3) Cycles 13 to 18 (16:28 – 24:49) sound to me as if an orchestra of brass and string instruments is preparing for a performance warming up their pipes and strings. It does however start to get eerily fascinating as the piece turns into an otherworldly soundscape. (4) The last couple of cycles get so difficult to distinguish to my inexpert ears that I cannot help but group all of them. The one thing that I pretend to be able to hear is, that is that the cycles do sound a bit more random and even more brassy or stringy, or like a wind chime. 

 

To me, “I am sitting in a room” is a fascinating, captivating, and eery sonic representation of mise en abyme, the “technique of placing a copy of an image within itself, often in a way that suggests an infinitely recurring sequence”, which for anyone not as familiar with art theory can be recreated by standing between to mirrors facing each other. Each cycle of the piece becomes more distant and thus less relatable to the original recording. During those last cycles, I also had to think of the recordings of sounds from space and the planets in our solar system which sound just as fascinating and eery and otherworldly as Lucier’s wonderful piece.