{"id":274,"date":"2018-08-20T23:04:39","date_gmt":"2018-08-20T23:04:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wri-101c-f18.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/?p=274"},"modified":"2018-08-20T23:04:39","modified_gmt":"2018-08-20T23:04:39","slug":"lucier-and-the-shortcomings-of-modern-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wri-101c-f18.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/blog-01\/lucier-and-the-shortcomings-of-modern-technology\/","title":{"rendered":"Lucier and the Shortcomings of Modern Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>While listening to Alvin Lucier&#8217;s soundtrack &#8220;I am Sitting in a Room,&#8221; 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&#8217;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\u00a0<em>ad infinitum<\/em> 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&#8217;s crowning achievement, is in fact prone to errors which, though seemingly insignificant alone, add up to massive discrepancies on the larger scale.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While listening to Alvin Lucier&#8217;s soundtrack &#8220;I am Sitting in a Room,&#8221; 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&#8217;s own language without [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-blog-01","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wri-101c-f18.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wri-101c-f18.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wri-101c-f18.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wri-101c-f18.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wri-101c-f18.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wri-101c-f18.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":275,"href":"https:\/\/www.wri-101c-f18.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274\/revisions\/275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wri-101c-f18.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wri-101c-f18.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wri-101c-f18.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}