For this assignment, I took the eponymous line of Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room” and repeatedly processed it using a few of Audacity’s built-in features.

Originally, I had intended to simply change the tempo of the recording and add echo with each iteration, but I found that doing so led to an extremely uncomfortable beating effect as the sampling rate became perceptible. I switched to using Paulstretch, which allows for extremely long stretching without losing (subjective) quality. I also added a low-pass filter at 5000 Hz to prevent the high frequencies in the “s” sound from dominating the recording.

On each iteration, using Audacity:
Paulstretch – Stretch Factor 1.15, Time Resolution 2s
Echo – Delay Time 0.35s, Delay Factor 0.15
Low-pass filter – Cutoff Frequency 5000 Hz,  Rolloff per octave 6 dB

The end result after twenty iterations (all included in the link) is a soundscape which is completely unrecognizable from the simple original message.