Work of the Month #6: Alvin Lucier - "I Am Sitting In A Room"

cornbb

AMG review by Douglas Wolk (and mp3 download at emusic.com):

The concept behind Alvin Lucier's most famous piece, one of the landmarks of contemporary compositional music, is so simple that he explains it in a few sentences at its beginning. It's so simple, in fact, that the explanation itself is the music. Lucier notes that he's going to play the recording of his explanation back into the room, and record that, and repeat the process until the resonant frequencies of the room have eradicated the sound of his voice. Finally, he adds that the point of the exercise is "to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have."

That's the theory, but the brilliance of I Am Sitting in a Room is that its practice is much more complicated than its theory, and more moving, because of the flaws that make technology and architecture and people what they are. Most recordings don't acknowledge that they're recordings — they pretend that they're simply what you would have heard if your ears had been in some unspecified place at the right time. This one puts the lie to that idea, and makes the disparity between its setting and its listeners' very obvious, too.

Recording and playback gear has improved over time (Lucier's first version of the piece, in 1969, lasted a bit over 15 minutes; this 1980 recording is almost three times as long), but it can't be made perfect — the space a sound is made in and the way it's recorded always affect the sound itself, and here they eventually destroy the sound. And, as becomes obvious almost immediately, the idea of "smoothing out irregularities" isn't just Zen philosophy: Lucier has a severe stutter, and eliminating his speech's irregularities means eliminating his voice altogether — you can hear him attempting to read his text without a glitch, and failing.

A few minutes into the piece, the room starts ringing audibly; phonemes fall away, little by little. For a while, the sounds that are left take the shape of the methodical, halting phrases we've heard Lucier speak over and over. Then even that melts into the air, and all that's left is wordless, hovering music, bringing the room in which it was recorded into any room in which it's heard. The map becomes the territory it describes.

I think this review sums up the piece pretty well. Its a fascinatingly simple composition for all the reasons described above, and it can easily be "performed" by anyone with some patience and basic recording equipment. Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this piece is that it's aesthetic content (at least towards the end) is almost entirely determined by the recording environment/equipment, rather than by the words or the voice. This piece is dirt cheap on emusic.com and is well worth picking up.

John

That's what really impresses me about this piece, just how simple and easy it is to do but the ramifications of it are so large. Any sound is coloured by the space it occurs in ("I am sitting in a room, different to the one you are now in") and at the end of the piece all that is left is the "colour" of the room in the rhythm of the speech.

I've often thought of taking the first utterance of Lucier's speech from the recording and trying it in different rooms, i.e. start with his first recording and seeing what different spaces sound like after the same number of recording repetitions.

Scubadevils

Certainly sounds experimental, might give this a bash.

cornbb

I found the original (1969) recording of the piece available for download here: http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/source/Lucier-Alvin_Sitting.mp3

Its shorter and noisier than the 1970 recording but it's essentially the same thing.

Enjoy!

Setun

John wrote: »

I've often thought of taking the first utterance of Lucier's speech from the recording and trying it in different rooms, i.e. start with his first recording and seeing what different spaces sound like after the same number of recording repetitions.

That's an interesting idea actually.

I was introduced to this piece by a cousin actually, and immediately was blown away by the concept. Got my hands on the 1980 (I think) 45 minute long version soon after, and listened to it while falling asleep one morning. It was such a strange experience because as I slowly drifted off the sounds became more and more abstract and ambient, until I woke about a half hour later to hear these incredible long tones. So I listened to it again properly, and enjoyed it as a milestone in ambient electronic music.

Does the piece become instrumental through the abstraction of his voice? Or is it always a 'voice'?

Ubuweb is a fantastic resource for experimental everything actually, put it on your favourites if it isn't already

cornbb

I just found a digital "cover" of this by an electronic artist: http://www.archive.org/details/residuum-i_am_sitting_in_a_room_mp3

The voice is synthesised and the reverb is provided by a software plugin, so its Lucier's rules applied in a digital setting - the natural, physical characteristics of the room are provided by the plugin's mathematical algorithms. Kinda cool! The results are similar too, although maybe a bit more clinical and colder.

Daddio wrote: »

Does the piece become instrumental through the abstraction of his voice? Or is it always a 'voice'?

Thats a matter of opinion I guess! I would say the eventual sound has been seeded by his voice, traces of it would remain but virtually all frequencies except for the few prominent ones left would be filtered out. The ones left are more creations of the room then of his voice. Maybe an acoustician could set me straight.

Ubuweb is a fantastic resource for experimental everything actually, put it on your favourites if it isn't already

Will do, cheers for that.

John

Some interesting paragraphs about I am Sitting in a Room and Lucier's approach to sound in space from The Wire issue 245, July 2004:

Much of Lucier's vast output has explored the movement of sound through space. Intrigued by this most elemental auditory phenomenon, he has constructed an endless variety of settings in which to study how sound waves interact with one another and with their spatial environments. Cavernous halls, institutional stairways, railroad boxcars, domestic rooms, milk bottles, sea shells, glass vases, ostrich eggs - all have served as laboratories for his humble yet profound and poetic audio art. "Thinking of sounds as measurable wavelengths instead of as high or low musical notes," Lucier remarked in 1969, "changed my whole idea of music from a metaphor to a fact and, in a real way, has connected me to architecture." This fascination with sound in space and in resonant environments of all sorts quickly led him out of the concert hall and away from any sort of traditional music composition.

...In the spring of 1970, Lucier moved to Middletown, Connecticut to take up a position at Wesleyan University, a hot spot for ethnomusicology that, under his tutelage, has since become a key coordinate in the landscape of American experimental music and sound art. Newly settled in a rented faculty apartment replete with wall-to-wall carpet and thick drapes, he recorded the piece that, in so many ways, has become his signature, I Am Sitting in a Room. In his typically modest yet earnestly investigative style, he recorded a short text that simply described the procedure of the piece: "I am sitting in a room different to the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have."

Like Music for Solo Performer, the piece is beautifully simple and bluntly scientific, yet also marvellously transformative. The text is read into one tape recorder and then repeatedly played back into another - 35 times in the available recording, a 1980 version issued by Lovely Music. Over the 45 minutes of the performance, Lucier's voice - and particularly his characteristic stutter (fittingly manifested in the key words "rhythm" and "smooth") - gradually becomes engulfed by the space. After ten cycles, speech has become a surging wash of metallic tones, like a slow, distorted steel drum routine. After 20 cycles, it has become a distant carillon dirge; after 30, a nervous, Ovalesque drone. What began as a personal confession in a domestic space gradually becomes pure, anonymous sound that overwhelms and abolishes the performer's personality.

This commitment to anonymity and purity is, oddly enough, characteristic of Lucier's musical practice. Like Cage and many post-Cagean experimentalists and minimalists, Lucier wishes to reduce self-expression in order to get at the acoustic phenomena themselves. For Lucier, this is what distinguishes properly 'experimental' music from 'improvisation'. "If you improvise," he contends, "it's your past and your personal preferences and your ideas about what sounds should or can be that you're thinking about." Reflecting on Vespers, he continues, "I am satisfied not to compose terribly much but to let the space and the situation take over. In other words, I don't intrude my personality on a space... I just bring a very simple idea about a task that players can do and let the space push the players around."

...Lucier focusses on [...] nature and natural phenomena in all their magnificence. Not surprisingly, then, his inspiration frequently comes from the physical sciences. "Scientific experiments have often given me ideas for pieces," he grants. "Sometimes I do little more than frame them in an artistic context."

...This combination of scientific investigation and aesthetic sensibility led to Lucier's discovery of the wonders of feedback. In the autumn of 1975, writer and sound artist Douglas Kahn sent Lucier a package containing a peculiar Christmas tree ornament: a baseball-sized silver bird that repeatedly emitted a mournful electronic chirp. Lucier spent an afternoon in Wesleyan's electronic music studio emperimenting with the birdcall and a pair of binaural microphones designed to be worn in the ears to aid in the production of realistic recordings. "At one point," Lucier recalls, "feedback began to sound. Before I could get to the amplifier and lower the volume control I began hearing phantom images of the birdcall, which seemed to come from inside my head and at the same time to be located in various parts of the room. They were amazing. What I was hearing was heterodyning, a term in radio technology describing beat frequencies produced between radio frequencies. In this case, the phenomenon was produced by the interaction between the continuous strands of feedback and the sounds of the birdcall, both within audio range." Inspired by his discovery, Lucier decided to take this oddball set-up to the stage under the title Bird and Person Dyning. He mounted the chirping bird on a microphone stand flanked by two loudspeakers. With the microphones in his ears, Lucier would slowly move through the performance space, tilting his head to orchestrate strands of feedback and looking for sweet spots where he could capture ghostly twitters.

Setun

What other works of his are available? I'm intrigued by what's mentioned in that Wire extract, namely "Cavernous halls, institutional stairways, railroad boxcars, domestic rooms, milk bottles, sea shells, glass vases, ostrich eggs". Ostrich eggs??

DadaKopf

Ah deadly, I love this piece. American composer Paula Matthusen has done a variation on this using complex computeronics called Filling Vessels. She'll be doing something in Dublin at the end of this month.

John

DadaKopf wrote: »

She'll be doing something in Dublin at the end of this month.

When/where?

And Daddio, I'll check the article and see if it throws up any other pieces.