https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAxHlLK3Oyk
Listen: Alvin Lucier – I Am Sitting In A Room.
Find a quiet place where you can sit and relax undisturbed for 45 minutes. Listen to Alvin Lucier’s seminal sound art piece I Am Sitting In A Room. Use a good pair of headphones. Listen to the piece from beginning to end. Don’t skip any parts. Don’t look at your phone. Don’t look at your computer. Concentrate on the experience.
Afterward, read Collecting Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room, and then, write a post in which you detail your exact experience listening to the piece and your understanding of it after reading the text. Also, reflect on how sound and music fit within the context of art. Your reflection should be two to three paragraphs in length.
I would say that my listening experience of this piece is magical. I didn’t know anything about the piece in advance, so I was surprised to find that the piece is made up of a person speaking the same paragraph over and over again with the growing frequencies, reinforced with each playback. The human voice gradually dies down and all I can hear is the resonant frequencies within the room. When I was listening to the music, I had the image of this piece being recorded in a small room with specific architectural material so that the walls can generate this effect. I could here the noise in the background. And the music reminds me of the kind of music I often hear in the art galleries or museums.
Before reading the passage, I didn’t know that the composer shuttered. I heard the shuttering like “rhythm”, but I thought it was deliberately composed. From the reading, I learned that Alvin attempted to smooth out his shutter. Surprisingly, the shutter didn’t disturb my overall listening experience.
In the reading, it says that “As the recorded sound of his speech grew faint and the frequencies more distinct, we witnessed sound as physical fact. No longer just an auditory phenomenon, this was a physical, material, and spatial experience, implicating the institutional architecture of the room in the radical nature of the piece. Eventually the recorded sound transformed into a complete abstraction of the original, specific to the very walls around us. ” This explanation helps me better understand this piece of music. This piece begins with human voice and sounds produced by the architecture of the space gradually dominated the sonic experience. So when I’m listening to this piece, I don’t only hear the sound, but I also hear the space where the sound is produced. Therefore, when the auditory experience combine with its material production, it creates a connection between the sound and the space. The reading also discusses the temporality of the recording. It’s a particular effect in a certain time and space, which makes it an amazing artifact.