"I Am Sitting in a Room"
Post your reflection as a series of 3 statements, each describing a distinct moment in your experience of listening to "I Am Sitting in a Room".
"I Am Sitting in a Room", Alvin Lucier
I am sitting in a room different from 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 r-r-r-rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity nnnnnot so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to s-s-smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.
Comments
The second time through I was struck by his use of the word "destroyed", it seemed like such an irrationally harsh description for the slow and methodical erosion of his voice, it gave me the impression that the artist found this project to be personally cathartic.
There was an odd internal struggle to keep the words alive, as the syllables faded it left me with an eerie impression of mortality and I almost had to reason with myself to let the words transition into sound.
When I first heard the constant hum in the background I felt that the piece had entered a new frontier, it had really evolved and entered an other-wordly zone that was now consistent and fully dimensional, there was no downtime between words to collect your analysis.
Posted by: Ben Hanson | February 4, 2009 1:27 AM
The first portion of the piece that was interesting to me was the second round, where he played the original once in the room. This gave us a good perspective on the space, if you listen to the difference in the first and the second you can notice some subtle changes. These changes include echoing and reverberation, this lets us know a little about the size and contents of the room without too many distractions.
The next portion I enjoyed was when his speech became unrecognizable, at this point I was getting tiered of hearing the recorded speech. At this point the rhythms that Alvin Lucier was talking about become recognizable.
The third point that I found interesting was when all the frequencies in the room started to have some harmony. I noticed it mostly in between words or sentences. This started happening towards the end and continued to build. This was the most interesting because at one point you start to recognize sounds that were not present before, and it forces you to hear those sounds again in the next round as they continue to build.
Posted by: Brian Larson | February 4, 2009 1:28 AM
I was surprised how non-repetitive I found this piece was even in its beginning stages considering Lucier's sentence was repeated verbatim.
Once the words started getting lost about a third of the way through, the melody reminded me of a wooden xylophone being played with a soft mallet. I enjoyed the evolution of Lucier's voice from monotone speaking to complex sound.
Toward the end, with my eyes closed, I could imagine that I was in the center of an empty room and the sound was slowly making its way toward me and becoming more and more tangible along its journey.
Posted by: Haley | February 4, 2009 1:33 AM