Chambers: Scores by Alvin Lucier

3. "I Am Sitting in a Room"

"I AM SITTING IN A ROOM" "I AM SITTING IN A ROOM" (1969) for voice and electromagnetic tape. Necessary Equipment: 1 microphone 2 tape recorders amplifier 1 loudspeaker Choose a room the musical qualities of which you would like to evoke. Attach the microphone to the input of tape recorder #1. To the output of tape recorder #2 attach the amplifier andloudspeaker. Use the following text or any other text of any length: "I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselvesso that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonantfrequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of aphysical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularitiesmy speech might have/' Record your voice on tape through the microphone attached to tape recorder #1. Rewind the tape to its beginning, transfer it to tape recorder #2, play it back into the room through the loudspeakerand record a second generation of the original recorded statement through the microphone attached to tape recorder #1. Rewind the second generation to its beginning and splice it onto the end of the original recorded statement on tape recorder #2. 30 Play the second generation only back into the room through the loudspeaker and record a third generation of the original recorded statement through the microphone attached to tape recorder #1. Continue this process through manygenerations. All the generations spliced together in chronological order make a tape composition the length of which is determined by the length of the original statement and the number of generationsrecorded. Make versions in which one recorded statement is recycledthrough many rooms. Make versions using one or more speakers of different languages in different rooms. Make versions in which, for each generation, the microphone is moved to different parts of the room or rooms. Make versions that can be performed in real time. 31 This page intentionally left blank What's your attitude toward a performance that consists of playing a tape? Well, all of us who have made pieces with electronics started with tape because it enables you to play with sounds in ways that no other medium does, but you soon get tired of that because live performances are more interesting than taped ones. Tape led us to discover things about sound that had hitherto been unknown and prepared us to go on and do more interesting things without it, but we always kept tape as a way to store sounds to bring into a live performance. Now in "I amsitting in a room/' I didn't choose to usetape, I had to, because in order to recycle sounds into a space, I had to have them accessible in some form. Tape, then, wasn't a medium in which to compose sounds, it was a conveyor, a means to record them and play them back one after another in chronological order. Without tape I wouldn't have been able to do the piece. When you worked on materials for the piece, there was never a moment until all those generations had been spliced together that the piece was complete, Yes, becausethe form is linear and cumulative; it changesfrom generation to generation until it reaches the point of diminishing returns . And it's funny because if I had consulted an engineer, he or she would probably have found a way to get the end result in one process, one fast process, or one generation. There are ways to by33 pass erase heads on tape recorders or make large loops which could get the end result very quickly, but I was interested in the process, the step-by-step, slow process of the disintegration of the speech and the reinforcement of the resonant frequencies. Actually, when Mary and I visited the Polaroid Company in Cambridge—Mary, as you know, did a visual analog to the tape by subjecting a Polaroid snapshot to a similar reproductive process—the art director, when he saw the end result, said, "I could do that in one step/' He...