A History of Sound: “I Am Sitting in a Room”
History of Sound
Week 1 A History of Sound
Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room” is a temporal experience moving for something that has clear independent parts and form to a sensory wave that is hard to reconcile. Much like the how the repetition of a single word many times in sequence causes a loss of meaning for that word, it becomes sounds strung together with some vague memory of its former self. I believe this is the point that Lucier is trying to make with the endless reduction of discrete sound elements the focus shifts from words to resonant frequencies. The longer the experience goes on the more the memory of the words fade and finally it becomes clear there is nothing left, forcing the listener to come to terms with the eerie notion that there was never anything there in the first place.
There are many examples of this work preformed in different locations and different times of his life, some are fairly short and some run the clock at almost an hour. The more time given to the repetition of the recording, the less discrete the sound becomes and the more it becomes a feeling.
The example I have included here is 45 minutes in length the transformation becomes very evident around minute 16 and at minute 35 almost all individual sounds have all but vanished. If you don’t have almost an hour to listen to this version try some from the list below.
spotify:track:09pHNT4RIvhLui6eIi4HKO