In February 2020, during my graduate Sound Art studio with Diane Willow, we listened to Alvin Lucier’s 1969 I am Sitting in a Room. The group experienced this 45-minute recording together as a class in one of the sound rooms with eight surround speakers. Most people were lying on the floor or sitting quietly in the dim lights with their eyes closed. The premise is that, while sitting in a room, Lucier reads a script into a voice recorder, then plays the recording in the same room. The recording is recorded again. Then the recording of the recording is recorded, and so on for 45 minutes. The sound quality changes with each iteration such that by the end, the imperfections and distortions of the recording process are more prominent that the words, evoking all sorts of questions about meaning and process.
Here are my thoughts from that day:
Memory is in the sound. As you fade from the reality of the denotative words to something else, you experience the gradualness of evolution, time, and change. Brilliant. New harmonies are constantly introduced because of imperfections in the technology. Sometimes even new notes just start playing. I started thinking about playing a room “with a voice” (as Lucier says), in that every room would have a different response or song based on its acoustic properties.
I was imagining reading a script of painful memories, or a traumatic story, and wondering if it would be therapeutic to hear what other (beautiful?) realities exist in the recording, suggesting that there is always more than one reality to any situation or memory. It’s a metaphor for experiences of all kinds. What other layers exist in our perceived realities? Sitting in a room enunciating a script is a façade for what other dimensions could exist in the world. It’s important to remain patient with experiences and to be careful with our senses. There’s more out there, and it’s always in flux, evolving.
I love how gradually it moves from an intellectual, language communication thing to a different kind of listening. The “distortions” become not aberrations or mistakes, but the very thing you’re listening to. The words become useless and unimportant. Then this goes through phases, so that what you thought was the sound evolves into something else, again. One sound spawns or becomes the next, and the old one fades. It’s all very Buddhist.
The room is animated! It has a voice.