Lucier, Aristotle and Sterne all sought to understand, as Stefan G. Helmreich put it, “embodyment, the senses and how we understand those things scientifically, humanistically, culturally, philosophically” in the respective mediums we watched, listened and read. What was very interesting was how each respective medium understood the senses, more specifically sound. Aristotle was one of the first human beings to think of asking the question of why exactly sound happens and what exactly happens when we hear a sound. His understanding of sound was more philosophical than Sterne, who explained that the Sound Studies reader was written with “sound students” in mind. This scientific approach is even still different from Lucier’s understanding. Although he stated that he was, in fact, conducting a scientific experiment of sorts, his experiment focused on the overall experience, hence why it is a sound clip for us to listen to rather than a book for us to read like the Sound Studies Reader is.
Elements of both Aristotle and Sterne’s works are present in Lucier’s “I am Sitting in a Room”. I can imagine the sound waves of the playback recordings bouncing off of the assumedly smooth walls of the room Lucier is in and I can also agree with Sterne on the fact that the lack of a visual representation of Lucier’s experiment further immersed me in the audio experience. What Lucier’s audio seems to do is tie all three of these pieces together by taking the written assumptions and contextualizing them. Lucier gives both Aristotle and Sterne an outlet with which to test their theories or the average Joe an opportunity to grasp just what they were talking about, even if he didn’t originally intend to.
