Relationship Between Sound and Space in I am Seating in a Room by Alvin Lucier - Essay Example

Music 29 November I am Sitting in a Room Few composers explore the relationship between sound, music, and space in their work. In fact, if they do, they often cease to become composers. Rather, the action of composing sound as opposed to composing music, or focusing on raw sound as opposed to melody, forces these artists to adopt a new practice and label, willingly or unwillingly, of that of sound artist. As a rule, the complex interplay between listening to sound or music, composing sound or music, and physically experiencing sound or music in the body or in a particular physical space remains altogether outside of critical art or musical discourse, not to mention interdisciplinary art practice. Instead, the artists who firmly occupy one discipline – composers who compose music, artists who create visual art, and architects who fashion functional space – find themselves more readily embraced by critics and audiences. Artists whose work combines all of these disciplines however often encounter a chilly, if not confused, critical and audience response. Susan Philipsz, who won the Turner Prize in 2010, has been called the “first artist working with sound to have won the prize,” and some sound artists view this development as a positive harbinger for the discipline as a whole (Searle n.p.) Searle describes Philipsz as “just a singer, with the sort of voice you might feel lucky to come across at a folk club. But there is much more to Philipsz than a good voice. All singers, of course, are aware of the space their voice occupies, of the difference between one hall and another...But the way Philipsz sites recordings of her voice is as much to do with place as with sound” (Searle n.p.). True, Philipsz’s use of sound is extraordinary. However, Philipsz is still “singing” in the traditional sense of the word. It is the physical placement of her singing voice – under bridges, and “called across a lake in Germany and…swept away by the wind on a Folkestone headland” – that classifies her as an experimental sound artist (Searle n.p.). Yet, her work is still firmly rooted in conventional melody and music. A true sound artist investigates sound itself, regardless of whether or not the sound produces music. Sound artists define the term polymath; they straddle multiple disciplines, including art, music, performance art, and architecture, and become masters in each. However, the critical community has not caught up to the speed at which these artists process the physical world. Aside from the occasional Burning Man performance, for the most part sound artists remain in obscurity. This reality exists because sound art by nature occupies a fractious, shadowy space between two critical perspectives that harbor two powerful biases: the visual bias of the so-called “visual” art school of criticism, and the “music” bias of the music school of criticism. Both biases persist and effectively hamstring critics to discuss one or the other, but never both. Is it art, or is it music? Is it sound, or is it art? As Cox argues, “the broader field of sound art has been ignored by musicologists, art historians, and aesthetic theorists. The open-ended sonic forms and often site-specific location of sound installations thwart artists musicological analysis, which remains oriented to the formal examination of discrete sound structures and performances, while the purely visual purview of art history allows its practitioners not only to disregard sound art but also to gloss over the sonic strategies of Postminimalism and Conceptualism” (Cox 146). Never mind that music itself is a form of sound – in fact, all noise that the human ear processes can be conceived of as such – yet the polarizing critical perspectives persist, to the detriment of scholars and audiences alike. As Cox explains, “sound art remains so profoundly undertheorized, and…has failed to generate a rich and compelling critical literature…because the prevailing theoretical models are inadequate to it. Developed to account for the textual and the visual, they fail to capture the nature of the sonic” (Cox 145). In addition, sound art occupies an inscrutable area that continually oscillates between the subjective and objective realities of noise and silence. As Watson explains, “understanding noise and silence in their objective reality involves studied engagement with the experiences which give rise to the sensory effects induced by them for the subject,” thus it remains firmly outside quantifiable, universal experience or scholarship (Watson 37). Sound artists endeavor to describe the indescribable. “The intrinsic ambiguity of aural space…means that certain kinds of transformations may be effected in aural space which it is very difficult to relate in any way to a visual analogue” (Wishart 158). Truth be told however, the discipline of sound art represents a discipline of art wherein music, sound, art, physical experience, performance, and even architecture co-exist peacefully and beautifully. Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room represents one of the earliest and most penetrating examples of sound art ever created. “Alvin Lucier was probably the first composer to realize that an architectural space could be more than a supportive setting for musical instruments, that it could be an instrument itself” (Collins n.p.). The following essay investigates the relationship between sound, space and music in I am Sitting in a Room. The essay examines the work in detail and reviews some of the critical receptions to it over the years, and asserts that perhaps critical reception to the work from Salome Voegelin, Trevor Wishart, and Christoph Cox in recent years has finally grasped the enormous significance of this work in the sound art canon. Despite the fact that I am Sitting in a Room is over 40 years old, it remains a powerful demonstration of the complementary relationship between sound, music, and physical space that continues to arrest and fascinate listeners and critics alike. Born in New Hampshire in 1931, American composer Alvin Lucier has been called a “trailblazing force in psycho-acoustic music, avant-garde composer, and performance” (Ankeny n.p.). Alvin Lucier received his musical education at Yale and Brandeis; in 1960, the composer won a Fulbright Scholarship to study music in Rome (Ankeny n.p.). Upon his return, he began teaching at this alma mater, Brandeis, where he also led the chamber chorus at the university (Ankeny n.p.). Alvin Lucier describes his own work as a hybrid form of music composition and aural architecture. In Alvin Lucier’s words, "I have tried to discover ways of moving sounds in space and revealing their sculptural characteristics…The results are often subtle, often too much so for the average listener to discern. I accept this obstacle to the comprehension of my works but retain the intention as an impetus for compositional ideas" (Kilpatrick 149). Alvin Lucier first came to prominence as a composer in 1964 with his solo piece Music for Solo Performer (1964-1965) for Enormously Amplified Brain Waves and Percussion, a live performance sound installation wherein the composer employed the actual sounds generated by his own brain to create music (Ankeny n.p.). Alvin Lucier remains increasingly fascinated by the physical body and its relationship to space and sound; therefore many of his works explore this relationship using “biological stimuli” such as brain waves, heart beats and “performers’ physical movements” (Ankeny n.p.). Though Alvin Lucier is usually referred to as a composer, he does not create musical compositions in the “conventional sense” (Raymond 145). Rather, Alvin Lucier represents the successful sound artist – an individual capable of combining several seemingly disparate disciplines into one work using unconventional means. As a sound artist, Alvin Lucier’s concern lies more with the nature of noise and what it tells us about our relationship to the physical world. As Raymond notes, Alvin Lucier’s work tends to live “more in the category of performance art than music as such” (Raymond 145). In a similar vein as I am Sitting in a Room, Alvin Lucier's Clocker uses a ticking clock to highlight the physical body’s relationship with time. Clocker uses a ticking clock that Alvin Lucier “amplified, distorted, sped up, slowed down, and occasionally stopped dead…[It is less] a piece of music [than] a kind of aural essay on time: sometimes boring, sometimes exciting, completely unpredictable” (Raymond 145). When Alvin Lucier accepted a teaching position at Wesleyan University in 1970, he began to create I Am Sitting in a Room (Ankeny n.p.). The initial goal of the piece was to investigate simple “acoustical phenomena” – how space affects sound and vice versa (Ankeny n.p.). I am Sitting in a Room runs for 45 minutes and 23 seconds. Essentially, the piece contains three distinct movements of roughly 15 minutes each. Alvin Lucier recites the following block of text 32 times in 32 different rooms: “I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have” (Lucier n.p.). Alvin Lucier the composer stutters; thus, in the initial repetitions, some of the consonants sound distorted and drawn out as a result of his inability to immediately enunciate them. This element of the work makes it one of the composer’s most personal and revealing works. It is also one of the purest examples of the composer using his most immediate instrument – his own voice – to create his masterpiece. As Alvin Lucier explains, "my first impulse was to use various musical instruments playing a wide variety of sounds, but I tossed out that idea because it felt too composerly. Instead, I decided to use speech; it's common to just about everybody and is a marvelous sound source. It has a reasonable frequency spectrum, noise, stops and starts, different dynamic levels, complex shapes. It's ideal for testing the resonant characteristics of a space because it puts so much in all at one time. It's also extremely personal” (Collins n.p.) In I am Sitting in a Room, the stutter itself immediately distinguishes itself to the listener and foreshadows the mysterious, distorted realm that the piece eventually takes the listener. As Collins explains, “in Lucier's case [I am Sitting in a Room] is all the more personal by virtue of his speech impediment – his stutter – which becomes the rhythmic signature of the piece” (Collins n.p.). As the 32 repetitions of the aforementioned text progress, each of the words begins to mutate into distinct tonal qualities; however, in the first movement – of approximately 15 minutes – the listener still discerns a human voice speaking English words, although with “each repetition the syllables are drawn out and resonated” (Collins n.p.). As Alvin Lucier moves from room to room, an interlude of several seconds of silence ensues. When he begins to speak again, the listener notes a subtle abstraction in his speech from the earlier incarnation. The words never change; what changes is the effect of the space upon the words and the voice that speaks them. In the second movement, the words begin to break apart. Some parts of the language remain intelligible, such as “frequencies,” “natural” and “rhythm,” however, many of the other words have already morphed into extremes of noise and globs of sound – deep bases, high shrieks, long, keening, banshee-like wails, and short barks. During the second movement, language slowly and subtly recedes from the piece. By the time the third movement begins, the listener can no longer “distinguish where one word ends and another begins; the text is completely unintelligible. What was once a familiar word has become a whistled three-note motif; what was once a simple declarative sentence has become a curiously tonal melodic fragment; what was once a paragraph of unaffected prose has become music” (Collins n.p.). In I am Sitting in a Room, Alvin Lucier succeeds at deconstructing language to the point that it becomes music. By the final movement, a melody invariably develops as the tonal frequencies subsume the words. As Collins explains, “somehow, somewhere in the course of 40 minutes the meaning of what we've been listening to has slipped from the domain of language to that of harmony” (Collins n.p.). I Am Sitting In A Room was created using extremely simple technology. By employing “two tape recorders, a microphone, and a speaker, [Alvin Lucier] recycles the recorded text in a room” (Collins n.p.). Forty years later, the effect of that ancient technology does not diminish from the piece in the least. This occurs because l Am Sitting In A Room experiments with architectural space consciously and utilizes the space as a member of the orchestra. l Am Sitting In A Room then becomes a champion for simplicity in art as well as music – a raw voice, an empty room – and nothing but the “acoustical properties of the space [to] transform the speech” (Collins n.p.). In addition, another strength of the piece – and indeed the element that lends itself to the piece’s timelessness – lies in Alvin Lucier’s confidence in the frequencies of the room to work their magic on his voice. As Collins explains, “the frequencies resonant to the room are repeatedly reinforced, while the others are attenuated, until only the rhythm of the words remains recognizable as the driving force behind a pattern of ringing tones. [Alvin Lucier] was certainly the first [composer] to create a substantial body of work out of that realization” (Collins n.p.). In the past, critics have referred to Alvin Lucier as a "phenomenological composer" (Collins n.p.). This description however does not do justice to the full range of expression that this artist has captured during his career. Rather, the term sound artist applies; Alvin Lucier has demonstrated through experimentation and commitment to the discipline of sound art, which is actually a confluence of multiple disciplines – art, music, performance, and architecture – the complex and fascinating relationship human beings have with sound and space. As Collins notes, Alvin Lucier’s work is "about acoustical phenomena, yet [it is also] as much about discovery and transformation” (Collins n.p.). I Am Sitting In A Room concerns “the subject, its narrator. By the end of the piece, with its magnificent ringing of architectural space, one sometimes forgets that it was a calm human voice that set the room into oscillation….we experience the gradual buildup of energy as the instrument starts to sound, but here we begin not with a meaningless puff of air but with words…the intersection of one man's voice with his immediate environment; those whistling tones are neither just any nor all of the resonances, but only those that are shared by both the voice and the room” (Collins n.p.) The piece I am Sitting in a Room concludes with Alvin Lucier’s clarion call of sorts for future sound artists: "continue this process through many generations.... Make versions in which one recorded statement is recycled through many rooms. Make versions using one or more speakers of different languages in different rooms. Make versions in which, for each generation, the microphone is moved to different parts of the room or rooms. Make versions that can be performed in real time" (Warde 110). As a performance piece, I am Sitting in a Room also successfully intersects the space between modernism and postmodernism. The piece clearly and effectively deconstructs language to its essence: sound. This action reminds the listener of the postmodern reality that all language is an agreed-upon human construct rather than an essence-in-itself that exists without human involvement. Yet the piece simultaneously evokes the modernist preoccupation with aesthetics and the avant garde. Though the piece was created over 40 years ago, it stands as a representative work of both movements. As Cox explains, “to the postmodernist, the new sound art might seem to retreat from social and political concerns. But neo-modernism has a politics of its own – a distinctly avant-gardist one that recalls both Greenberg and Theodor Adorno and implicitly criticizes postmodernism for its symbiotic relationship with the culture industry. In eschewing mass-media content, the genre proposes a more radical exploration of the formal conditions of the medium itself. Against the anesthetic assault of daily life, it reclaims a basic function of art: the affirmation and extension of pure sensation” (Cox 67). In addition to its theoretical success, I am Sitting in a Room also demonstrates a successful action on the part of its creator to employ an architectural space to articulate an aural space and to affect transference between the sound object and the acoustic space (Wishart 158). As Wishart notes, in I am Sitting in a Room, “the initial sound image is that of a voice speaking in a room with a given acoustic…at this stage our attention is not drawn to the room aesthetics. The voice is then recorded and the recording played back into the room...As this process proceeds the recording becomes increasingly coloured by the room acoustic until finally at the end of the piece we hear essentially the room resonance vaguely articulated by the amplitude fluctuations of the voice. In this case our perception of what is the sound object and what is the acoustic space in which it has been projected have been conflated” (Wishart 158). That such a transformation could occur in 45 minutes speaks to the genius of Alvin Lucier’s work. The effect remains so subtle and so simple that the listener hardly recognizes what has happened until long after the piece ends. As Wishart notes, “at the beginning of the piece we would unreservedly state that the sound object is the voice. At the end of the piece the sound object is clearly a more abstract entity whose characteristics derive from the room acoustic. Somewhere in between these extremes our perception passes over from one interpretation to the other. Not only, therefore, can we control the dimensions of…simple recognition / non-recognition and…recognition as A / recognition as B, but also the dimension acoustic space / sound object within an acoustic space” (Wishart 158). I am Sitting in a Room also demonstrates not only a deconstructing of language but a deconstruction of the human body’s relationship to sound as an indicator of space. As a work of art, this is perhaps its most impressive feat. As a work of art, I am Sitting in a Room essentially slowly yet irrevocably removes the security of space as experienced through sound, in the same manner that it slowly and surreptitiously removes the structure and security of language. In essence, the piece pulls aside the curtain of perception to reveal the wall of noise and chaos that human beings construct their realities from. As Voegelin points out, when Alvin Lucier “records this voice and plays it back into the room exploiting the distinct resonances of that room he is sitting in [he] erase[s] slowly, through repetition, the semantic meaning of the words that tell us of his location. And with this expunging of his voice’s semantic function the symbolic function of the room is eroded too. The repetitions erase its architectural certainty rather than stabilize it. In the end he is not sitting in a room at all anymore. Instead he is sitting in pure sound; the reverb and repetition having performed an acousmatic reduction to the core of sonic timespace: that of his enunciation and that of [our] listening” (Voegelin 127). I Am Sitting In A Room stands then as a signature piece of sound art which functions on a number of different levels. It can be described as a piece of music, a performance sound installation, a successful theoretical experiment, a postmodernist piece, as well as a modernist piece that excites both critical and aesthetically. Works Cited Ankeny, Jason. “Alvin Lucier: Biography.” All Music. All Music, n.d. Web. 28 November 2011. Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985. Collins, Nicolas. “Alvin Lucier: I am Sitting in a Room.” DRAM Online. Anthology of Recorded Music, n.d. Web. 26 November 2011. Cox, Christoph. “Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism.” Journal of Visual Culture 10.2 (2011): 145-161. Web. 26 November 2011. Cox, Christoph. “Return to Form: Christoph Cox on Neo-Modernist Sound Art.” Art Forum International 42.3 (2003): 67. Web. 26 November 2011. Kilpatrick. "Lucier: Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas." American Record Guide 67.2 (2004): 149. Fine Arts and Music Collection. Web. 28 Nov. 2011. LaBelle, Brandon. Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006. Lucier, Alvin. I am Sitting in a Room. Lovely Music, 1990. MP3. Raymond, David. "Lucier: Clocker." American Record Guide 58.4 (1995): 145-146. General OneFile. Web. 28 Nov. 2011. Searle, Adrian. “Turner Prize Winner Susan Philipsz: An Expert View.” Guardian 6 December 2010.: n.p. Web. 26 November 2011 Voegelin, Salome. Listening to Noise and Silence: Toward a Philosophy of Sound Art. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010. Warde, Ann. "Alvin Lucier: 40 Rooms." Computer Music Journal 24.2 (2000): 110-111. Academic OneFile. Web. 28 Nov. 2011. Watson, Mike. "Listening to Noise and Silence: Toward a Philosophy of Sound Art." Art Monthly 345 (2011): 37. Fine Arts and Music Collection. Web. 28 Nov. 2011. Wishart, Trevor. On Sonic Art. London: Routledge, 2002. Read More