Re: Room sounds

[improv@peak.org (Dave Trenkel)]

>    This thread on room sounds reminds me of a process piece, perhaps by 
>Lou
>Harrison. The title, as I best recall, was/is "I Am Sitting In A Room..."
>and it consists of a short text which is read out loud. The text is the 
>set
>of instructions for performance. Here's a paraphrase:
>    "I am sitting in a room with a microphone about six feet away. This
>microphone's signal is being recorded onto tape. This recording will be
>played back from approximately where I am sitting, and recorded again. 
>This
>process will be repeated for as long as is practical, and the entire 
>process
>will be recorded."
>    The resulting recording would then consist of this short spoken piece
>repeated over and over, slowly degenerating into room resonance and 
>circuit
>resonance until it sounded like a bit of musique concrete. There may have
>even been an instruction to play the entire thing backwards somehow,
>allowing the text to emerge from the cloud of resonances. Can anyone
>identify this piece better?

The composer is Alvin Lucier, and the piece is called "I am sitting in a
room". The piece takes up both sides of an lp, and I used to listen to the
2nd side a lot, after the spoken words have degenerated into a blur, it was
actually a very musical piece.

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Dave Trenkel : improv@peak.org  : www.peak.org/~improv/

"...there will come a day when you won't have to use
gasoline. You'd simply take a cassette and put it in
your car, let it run. You'd have to have the proper
type of music. Like you take two sticks, put 'em
together, make fire. You take some notes and rub 'em
together - dum, dum, dum, dum - fire, cosmic fire."
                                            -Sun Ra
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