I was focusing on every single word Lucier said when the recording first began. There are a couple of times when he intentionally pronounces words weirdly, and I kept questioning his purpose of doing so throughout his 45-minute piece (even though I still haven’t found out in the end). At first, there was only his voice repeating the same content again and again, and I was able to tell where exactly his weird pronunciation appears. As the piece moves on, his voice starts to echo and becomes less clear. I felt his voice gradually moving farther away and I started to vaguely hear new sounds in low volume from the negative space (when Lucier’s voice is not in the air), which sounds more like white noise. The human voice becomes vaguer and vaguer while the echoing-like sound is more dominant. In the end, recorded sound from Lucier is completely removed and I could only hear new acoustic sounds generated from the space with a constant frequency.
Lucier’s idea of turning his own voice into an abstract sound art piece without any post-production manipulation really surprises me, and the result turns out to be really satisfying and unexpected. He challenges my previous understanding of music/sound production that producers select sound elements from databases and remix them in softwares. As is mentioned in Martha Joseph’s journal, Lucier treated “space as a component of sonic production,” and reveals a “radical reversal of the logic of musical composition.” This practice stretches sound production to a level that lets sound produce sound itself through engaging in its physical environment (in this case, the walls). It offers audience auditory experience through time and space.