File this under: Music, Fascinating and Unlistenable

Well, maybe the title is overstating it just a tad. A few months back I discovered an intriguing piece by Alvin Lucier entitled "I am Sitting in a Room" (okay, I know that to any serious musicologist I'm showing up a little late to the party since Lucier's piece was composed and originally performed in 1969). Lucier is an interesting figure. He is an experimental composer whose work tends to explore the line between music and resonant sound. "I am Sitting in a Room" is his best known piece and in its original avatar (it has been recorded several times) it consisted of the composer uttering the following words:

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 themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rthym is destroyed. What you will hear then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room, articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.

The same passage, now recorded, is in fact played back in that same room, and recorded again, thus capturing--as Lucier points out--the resonant frequencies of the room itself. The entire process is repeated again and again, for some fifteen minutes or so, until any recognizably human qualities of his voice have been supplanted by a kind of ringing, tinny resonance that follows in only the most general contours the original inflections of his voice. By the time the recording / playback cycle has reached its final iteration, it has become a sample of pure resonance, a kind of aural snapshot of the acoustic properties of the room itself.

One of the things that makes this composition so striking is that Lucier himself is a chronic stutterer (hence the allusion to the "irregularities" of his speech) and there is something touchingly human and vulnerable about his own voice. Its gradual transformation into something wholly other--a pure acoustic effect generated by the physical properties of the room itself--is uncanny. It seems to accentuate the fact that what is most distinctively "our own" in our voice is inseparable from the spaces in which that voice is given utterance. While it's not a piece that is likely to reward repeated listenings, it is definitely a haunting work that invites reflection.