Blog 01

1). It’s difficult to pinpoint a special sound-related experience in my life because every day is something different and I’ve never focused on how much sound impacts those experiences. However, now I realize just how significant sound can be. A disastrous morning for me is waking up to the incessant beeping of my alarm clock. Then hearing the rumblings of thunder which, back home in Miami, meant a day of humidity. On the other hand, a perfect morning could not be more different. Waking up to the sound of silence followed by the hum of the coffee maker. I now realize that sound is useful to appreciate the simple beauties in life.

2). While listening to Lucier’s “I Am Sitting In A Room” recording I noticed my opinion shift. At first, I found it awkward and ominous. The stuttering, the choice of words, and especially the pauses all made my skin crawl. However, as the recording continued I noticed that Lucier’s voice began to fade while the echoes became more pronounced. The sounds started to blend with each other, becoming more hypnotic and more melodic. In fact, I found myself relaxing as the recording reached its end. I believe that Lucier was trying to find his voice not through words but by the sound it makes. By the end of the recording his words were forgotten but the soothing sound was still there.

Throughout high school I ran varsity cross country and track. Meets would always be extremely nerve wracking due to the crush of spectators and the resultant deafening noise of the crowd. However, right at the start of the race everyone would suddenly quiet down to hear the starter’s instructions. Then there would be a tantalizing pause, which even though it only lasted about three seconds would feel like an eternity, and then the gun would go off with a fierce bang. Everyone would start running and the crowd would go wild again. This noise is incredibly distracting and also anxiety-inducing since it can be used to upset opponents and get in your head. Luckily, I learned to be able to tune out the majority of the noise, until I was able to only hear my coaches’ voices encouraging me and telling me strategy. This was an important skill to master because the sounds I heard were only positive reinforcement, instead of hearing the negative aspects. This helped to improve my racing.

Throughout Lucier’s video, even though the words became more muffled and soon were no longer distinguishable, the repetitions created an intense amount of attention so you could still remember the words from the start and were able to pick out parts of the speech. It is also interesting to note that as the recording goes on it becomes almost melodic in nature, which reflects the fact that Lucier is referred to as a composer. At the start Lucier uses spoken word to convey his sound and then towards the end he chooses to convey his sound through music.

1) I’ve always adored music, I love every instrument and sound, and I can remember every moment of my life based on the music I was listening to at that time. Last year I had a major depressive episode, and I so badly wanted to give up, but instead I listened to music, I let sounds save my life. One artist in particular, Jason Mraz, has released hundreds of songs since 1999, and I am over whelmed by the peace I feel when I hear his voice. After going through that, I know I can get through anything, as long as I can listen to some tunes.

2) When listening to I am Sitting in a Room, I paid attention to every word said, and I concluded that the words said had to have been important to Lucier. I figured that it was important for him to note his position and location; I also assumed that each word had value to him. I though about how he said this only once, and let it play over and over again. I found that interesting because by only speaking once, and by letting his recording get recorded again, he was allowing his words to become distorted, over powered by the “resonance frequencies of the room.” I found this to be a great analogy for human life, we live, but we are overpowered by the greater world around us, leaving our lives distorted and obsolete.

High School is one of the first environments a person will come in contact with in their young lives where they gain friends and cliques through shared interests. Personally, the group I got along with the most were the hip hop heads. Many of my friends and I would always rap freestyles in lunch to show off our skills to each other. Not only did we freestyle, but many of my friends were interested in creating their own instrumentals on their computer for themselves or to sell to others. About a year ago, my friend Giovanni invited me to his house and showed me his ,”Studio”, which was actually really impressive for it being a small corner in the back of his room. Specifically, he showed me all of the beats his software has and we actually created one together under an hour. Since I do not have much experience with this technology, he taught me how the rhythm, melody, and other factors that come along when producing a beat play significant roles in the process to perfection. I had always thought that it was the lyrics in a song and the message behind it were the catalysts to making a song successful, however Giovanni taught me that a song can be just as meaningful without lyrics and just sound.

In Alvin Lucier’s,”I Am Sitting In A room”, it first would appear to many as a man recording himself and repeating the same two sentences until his voice completely fades and even transforms into noise. When Lucier’s voice is comprehensible, he exaggerates his stutter and sibilance. It is not until his voice fades out that I noticed Lucier used those as techniques to create a melody. In addition, the melody becomes more distinct as Lucier’s voice fades to the point where it transitions to where it is mostly sound and there are little chunks of his voice. The sound also contains the same rhythm of his voice when he was speaking, however the noise goes through another transition towards the end and it suddenly sounds like soothing meditation music. What I found most interesting was how Lucier’s voice was sound and there was noise in the background due to the recording, and then towards the end of the piece the noise in the background became sound and his voice became noise. I believe Lucier’s piece demonstrates the value behind the words of his short speech; they are not meant to be interpreted as lyrics, but instead as instruments to the song he created. Evidently, Lucier’s ,”I Am Sitting In A Room”, emphasizes the value of sound and the significance it gives to words.

 

 

1) My senior year roommate at my boarding high school was an avid video game player, specifically Fortnite. I would be sitting at my desk, attempting to do my any sort of school work and my ears would be flooded with a plethora of gun shots, snippets of dance music, and countless other sound affects. One specific compilation of sounds, however, will be permanently engraved in my mind. My roommate would often leave the one screen of the game open while he waiting for his friends to join his game. The background music to this screen consisted of a synthetic drum kit, mysterious and deep sounding bells, and a distorted guitar chords playing in a loop over and over again. While I don’t hear this piece as often as I used to, when I do a certain feeling of nostalgia kicks in and reminds me of all the good memories my roommate and I had in room 409 our senior year.

2) After hearing Lucier mutter the same words over and over again, my mind began to wonder. I focused on the first part of his statement and began to wonder how the room he was sitting in was so explicitly different from the room I found myself in. I was awoken from my thought when I noticed that his words went from decently clear and comprehendible to a string of resonating frequencies. I was expecting his recording to transform into something more melodic, but instead I found that the tones at the end seemed to clash.

I was initially puzzled as I listened to Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room”. Licier’s natural stutter is prominent in the initial recording and then accentuated every time he plays another recording back, this irregularity in his speech only seeming to be further emphasized as the recording progresses even though he states that he seeks to smooth them out. Why did Lucier choose to stop at forty five minutes and twenty four seconds? Why not thirty six minutes and four seconds or seventy two minutes and fifty nine seconds? Certainly there are multiple different degrees of reinforcement that the room’s resonant frequencies can show. When considering how the recording ended, I would argue that his speech wasn’t one hundred percent smoothed out. Could it ever be? I feel as if the playbacks emphasized Lucier’s speech imperfections, but not in a bad. Each new recording took on a more musical tone, the ending sounding as if it could be played in the part of a movie when the fatally-wounded heroin confusedly enters their society’s respective heaven and faced with the inevitable question of whether or not they want to die or be given a second chance at life and finish their quest. No heroes’ journey is ever perfect, much like Lucier’s journey to perfect his speech.

My father has always slept with a bedside fan for the sound it provides, a habit that has been passed on to both my younger brother and myself. I find that his lack of appreciation for total silence has also been unknowingly passed on to me as I cannot remember when, how or why I began sleeping with a bedside fan but it has been there for as long as I can remember. I find silence unnerving and can’t sleep without some type of background noise whether it be my own bedside fan or the Belk air conditioners’ fan control set on the “HI” setting. Music is another constant background noise I depend upon and is always playing from a speaker or headphones as vital background noise.

1) In high school I went to numerous bonfires with friends. At these bonfires, my friends and I would often times chat, laugh, eat smores, and listen to the one guy who knew how to play guitar. The night would be silent and the fire was always nice during the cold evenings of late fall. My friend started playing the song, “Cherry Wine” by Hozier. I listened so hard that I stoped hearing everything around me. My ears tuned into the guitar to where the only thing I heard was the sweet picking of the strings. This event taught me where music could take me if I tuned into it. I was able to feel what each individual pluck of the string really meant. This was the first time that I got emotional while listening to music that I never expected to hear or be so soothing to the lingering thoughts in my mind.

2) The recording by Lucier began to almost put me in a drowse. I began trying to listen to his words and each time the faint recognition of a few words may hav appeared to been clear. This piece makes me wonder if his overall purpose was to show that the world can sometimes lose focus of the important parts of life. I believe that Lucier wanted us to see that although we always know what he is going to say we only seem to pay close attention to each word when we can’t seem to hear them anymore. Towards the end of the piece my mind began to go into a place of meditation instead of focusing on the words I could no longer hear at all. It reminded me of a relaxation tape recording of sounds!

It is a beautiful, wondrous thing. To hear it from someone else fills you with a joy unlike any other; to know that this person is happier than they were before, at least temporarily, possibly because of you, makes you happier in return. The cycle continues. When they do it, you do too. And when you do it, they do it more. Eventually the sound dies out, but that feeling may not – it may just be struggling to escape, for the emotion supersedes the sound. And when, eventually, you come back down to earth, you still do not feel as heavy as before. The lightness lingers. It stays. You go about your day feeling just a bit better than you did when you woke up. Truly, it is the best medicine.

The listener begins with a voice. They understand the words, comprehend them, listen to them. These words begin to disappear, to become incoherent, yet the listener struggles on. The feedback, the bass boost, the reverb start to mix in to the vocal recording. The listener is soon hearing music. It becomes further distorted; only feedback remains. The listener ends only with the “natural resonant frequencies” of the room – the purpose of the activity.

While listening to Alvin Lucier’s soundtrack “I am Sitting in a Room,” each subsequent recodring further obscures the sound of the original message. Indeed, according to his prediction, the words eventually become mumbles, which slowly devolve into sounds. This is a very interesting process, as listening to a human voice in one’s own language without semantic consideration is nearly impossible, due to us being habituated to expecting meaning from the sounds that humans make. Indeed, Lucier has given us the rare chance to see the forest for the trees when it comes to human speech, or rather to see his utterances not just as semantic phrases but also as pure units of noise. One of the things that I find most interesting about the piece is that it exposes the faults which are apparent in the modern technological systems of representing the world. The gradual evolution of his words into pure sound indicates that the original recording was only partially accurate to the actual acoustic phenomena taking place, and that effect further made slightly more divergent recordings each time, which could potentially go ad infinitum to sounds which are more and more different from the original. What this serves to demonstrate is that contemporary technology, which is often hailed as being man’s crowning achievement, is in fact prone to errors which, though seemingly insignificant alone, add up to massive discrepancies on the larger scale.

The experience of listening to human sounds in English without processing semantics usually only takes place for me in music. Due to both the quick and loud style of today’s music and the imperfections in the recordings that transmit them to me, I often find myself at a loss for semantic interpretation of certain musical lyrics. However, this does not take away the beauty, as sounds can be similarly beautiful on their own to the words they represent.

(1) I sat only a few feet from the stage, in front of some of my favorite musicians. Their use of piano, synthesizers, guitar, drums, and voices brought tears to my eyes. I marveled at their ability to change the feeling in the room, bring back a memory of a time or transport me to a place.

(2) As the recording repeated over and over again, I found a parallel between the quality of the recording itself and the words that the speaker was saying. From recording to recording as the frequencies grew louder the words started to blur into the background. At the same time, the words repeated many times begin to lose their meaning as a complete thought and instead become just sounds. Another thing I found interesting was the way that the recording came to sound more and more like music. At first, it was almost like spoken word, then you began to hear only the rhythm of his voice (as he points out would happen), then a sort of gong sound, then a harp playing a song sound. Finally, it becomes so high-pitched that it sounds like wind chimes bumping into each other.

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.