I Am Sitting in a Room (1969)
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Edit to add link to YouTube of the recording: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fAxHlLK3Oyk
If anyone's interested but not enough to listen to the whole thing- listen to the first half a minute and then the last!
This is what I always do when showing other people this song. A 20 or 40 minute track is not an easy sell lol, especially this repetitive. But showing them 20 seconds from the start, middle, and end always gets a wow. Half of them usually want to hear the whole thing after that. And half of those turn it off after 5 minutes haha.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_and_Music:_A_History_of_...
"Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City is a 2003 book charting the history of popular music, by the music journalist and cultural commentator Paul Morley. Its style takes the form of a robotic Kylie Minogue traveling, with Morley, in a "cyber-car" toward a city of "sound and ideas". The starting points for this history of popular music are Morley's favourite pieces at the time of writing, Kylie Minogue's electro-pop song "Can't Get You Out of My Head" and Alvin Lucier's experimental "I am sitting in a room" "
Quite an original book as you can probably tell just from the description!
And MKBHD did a take on it in 2019 again with YouTube compression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR4KHfqw-oE
It might have been the 40+ minute version mentioned on Wikipedia (I certainly don’t remember) because I think I stood there for maybe 30 minutes listening. I caught it somewhere near the beginning and it was just so cool to listen to.
It was also fun to see the people who came and went and those who stayed there for as along as I did - or longer.
Edit: unrelated to this piece, but at or around the same time the same gallery also featured this “delightful” and disturbing piece: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/146989/clown-torture
Also, check out Lucier's Music On A Long Thin Wire. He used a power amp to run an audio from a signal generator into a wire and the wire sits in the field of a very strong magnet and vibrates, and the sound is extracted from piezo contact mics at each end of the wire. Very interesting stuff.
It is a part of the inspiration for the instrument I build and play, the Electroduochord, that uses a rotary magnetic bow.
• Is it possible to go backwards? Obviously not from the later iterations of this loop — all useful information has been lost — but from the first couple of iterations, say, is it possible to recognize "these are probably the room's resonant frequencies" and de-emphasize them?
• What would the experiment be like if each round involved re-playing the tape in a different room (one with presumably different resonant frequencies)? Would it sound significantly different / would there be some possibility of regaining information after more iterations than in the former case?
It's easier to do with white noise than a sample. But ideally you would use an "impulse" (an extremely short pulse of sound) in a dead-silent room. You play the impulse and record that along with any tailing reverberation/resonance. This it typically used to "capture" the audio response of something like a room or speaker cabinet. (You can purchase Impulse Responses of Abbey Road Studios, or famous cathedrals. It can even capture a speaker response and is often used by guitarists with digital setups). But you could invert it to remove resonance.
Keep in mind, even moving a millimeter will slightly change the phase of the resonances and thus the resulting response. So this would only work perfectly to remove a room response from a fixed speaker and a fixed microphone. But some mixing boards for live shows have an "anti feedback" system that works off this principle. It's not perfect, but it's good enough to prevent a microphone screech.
For 2, That's an interesting thought. My guess is that it would take longer to become inaudible, and be much more "diffuse". Like being recorded in a cave or room with very complicated geometry. It's almost like how most digital reverb effects work. They tend to pass sound through multiple layers of delay (aka echo) while applying phase shifting. Sometimes they are designed to resonate, but usually they are designed so all the delay layers conflict and don't resonate too strongly in any given frequency. Part of why it resonates in such a pronounced way is the fact that it's a fixed room and almost certainly rectangular (Which you may notice many recording or mixing studios tend to avoid being a "box").
For addressing room resonance, physical acoustic treatment (bass traps, diffractive and absorptive materials), or in the case of new construction optimising the structure of the room itself is the general approach, with DSP used to augment this.
There's an interesting intersection of this once you start diving into the world of active acoustics too. In the venue space you have systems like Meyer Constellation or L-ISA that use a distributed set of speakers and microphones to be able to change the room acoustics in real-time, or even emulate a different space.
I've always wanted to try to do a live version of this at an indoor noise or experimental music show. I'd use a shorter quote so I could get the same number of feedback cycles in a 15 minute set as his 40 minute version.
The fun part would be getting the entire audience to be silent for 15 minutes, but inevitably people and things would make sound and get picked up in the feedback loop. And you would end up with a pretty complex wall of sound by the end. Or maybe someone starts screaming into the microphone nonstop and ruins the whole set. While I hope that wouldn't happen, the chance it could is part of the fun.
Another "similar" work people might enjoy this is William Basinki's "The Disintegration Loops". This youtube link is just the first song, there are 4 in total but this is my favorite.
https://youtu.be/mjnAE5go9dI?si=KmoBu7SlY-XymGS0
It's a similar concept but for entirely different reasons. Rather than being an idea Basinski set out to capture, as Lucier did, it was an unexpected event he decided to pursue for several weeks.
Basinski was digitally recording some tape loops he had recorded about 20 years prior, and many of them were in very poor condition. Sometimes as he played back a tape loop, the ferrite coating would flake off of the plastic tape. Not only did that create a variety of noises that often sound like a soft crackling or puffs of noise, but each repetition of the loop would have less and less ferrite on it and thus decreasing fidelity and sometimes entire gaps in the audio. The fact that ferrite doesn't scrape off evenly, but sometimes in bursts and sometimes none at all creates a sort of progression in the song. Instead of building up like "I am Sitting in a Room", the sound decays into an eventual hum and sputter. A reverb effect is added and turned up gradually.
Like "I Am Sitting in a Room", it's about taking a short initial loop and letting physics compose the rest of the song. But it's destructive instead of constructive (and yet somehow the destruction becomes a constructive element). The initial sample choices are wonderful and the luck in how the tape falls away is perfect. Also IMO the fact that this could never be reproduced is just cool (and somehow comforting?).