WRI-101: Voice, Noise, Sound, Sense.

(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.