Looking Outwards 4 – Sara Frankel

Caption: This is the sound file from Lucier’s project “I Am Sitting in a Room”. As you can tell, his voice becomes quite distorted by the end of the project as the recording has been layered on top of another so many times.

Alvin Lucier’s project, “I Am Sitting in a Room” involves his voice, a room, and a recording/stereo system. How he goes about this project is he simply records his voice in a room by himself. After recording a few sentences, he replays his voice through the sound system in the room and records that through his microphone and he continues to play and record the newly layered recording. He does this for 45 minutes. As the recordings become more and more layered, one starts to notice that his sentences are no longer coherent as they become more “echoed”. By the time one reaches the end of the recording, the voice has become completely distorted and if anything, almost harmonic. Listening to the voice at this point in the recording is almost meditative if anything due to the sound waves of his voice being layered on top of each other. I admire this project because it truly proves the point that music is everywhere and within everyone. There is music and harmonic sequence within the everyday life, even so close to us that is our voice.

For even more information, here is a link to his exhibit at the MoMA in NYC, NY: https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2015/01/20/collecting-alvin-luciers-i-am-sitting-in-a-room/