Listening to the progressive distortion in Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room, I recalled a memory from my childhood.
In the house where I grew up, we had a system of wireless phones. One day when I was seven, I discovered that there was an intercom feature that I could use on the phones to secretly whisper to my brother from across the house.
Eventually, my brother got bored of the game, but I was still curious, and—as I had no one else to call—I decided to put both phones on speaker so I could pretend to use a microphone. As you might be able to imagine, I was shocked when immediately after I spoke I was greeted by a loud screeching noise. Immediately, I hung up and kept the handsets at least 10 feet apart until they were eventually confiscated by my mother (because she had more important things to do with them).
I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I later realized that the screeching was caused by a feedback loop. The sound coming out of one handset was then passed through the microphone of the other handset and then amplified back out into the first handset, causing the screeching noise. Alvin Lucier does something very similar in his track I am Sitting In A Room.
