Sitting in the Acoustic World

The process of history is not linear. 

 

    In primitive times, people passed down verbal knowledge by direct communication. After the printing technology was developed, people started to let their eyes be the tool to capture knowledge, as most westerners do. To be honest, I think McLuhan somewhat didn’t like this phenomenon. He pointed out that the 21st-century world will become acoustic and subtly advocated for this. However, the ironic part is, his intellectual masterpiece was written, in an article form, asking people to read with their eyes, instead of record it and really let the sound dominate our sensations. 

 

Flat, general, and homogeneous. 

 

    These are the words McLuhan used to describe how the visual world looks. On the other hand, the acoustic world seems to be the complementary and reversed definition of the visual world. The acoustic is diverse and changing constantly. This is true, at least in terms of Lucier’s works. What “I am sitting in a room” unveils is something about the pure energy of the acoustic world—the environmental sound. The echoes in the ending part of the sound clip aren’t homogeneous and general. They seem random, but flow according to the rhythm—the frequency of the room itself. In this case, the human is no longer the subject in the process, in contrast to the situation in the visual world. The sound is, initially created, but then gradually creating itself. In this circulation, we hear the room, but not the one we are sitting in.