Re: Room sounds

[Matt Davignon <mdavig@sfsu.edu>]

Lou Harrison is the guy who built an instrument called the "american 
gamelan".
They guy who did "I am sitting in a room..." was Alvin Lucier. He started 
by
reading a paragraph that he wrote. It's pretty much like what you wrote 
down
here. I think the 2 tape recorders were at opposite ends of the room. I 
don't
remember how long he did it or how many repititions there were, but I'm 
guessing
that it was about 20-40 minutes long. One of the really cool things about 
this
piece was that he was a bad stutterer, and about halfway through the piece 
you
couldn't tell the difference. By the end of the piece, there was no 
perceptable
speaking part, but the many layers of recorded room ambience made a
synthesizer-like sound.

matt davignon

"K. Douglas Baldwin" wrote:

>
>     This thread on room sounds reminds me of a process piece, perhaps by 
>Lou
> Harrison. The title, as I best recall, was/is "I Am Sitting In A Room..."
> and it consists of a short text which is read out loud. The text is the 
>set
> of instructions for performance. Here's a paraphrase:
>     "I am sitting in a room with a microphone about six feet away. This
> microphone's signal is being recorded onto tape. This recording will be
> played back from approximately where I am sitting, and recorded again. 
>This
> process will be repeated for as long as is practical, and the entire 
>process
> will be recorded."
>     The resulting recording would then consist of this short spoken piece
> repeated over and over, slowly degenerating into room resonance and 
>circuit
> resonance until it sounded like a bit of musique concrete. There may have
> even been an instruction to play the entire thing backwards somehow,
> allowing the text to emerge from the cloud of resonances. Can anyone
> identify this piece better?