Alvin Lucier - I Am Sitting in a Room

[leopies]

It's like a Radiohead album

[vwardv]

just reading words and music by Paul Morley which talks about this track. Thanks for posting.

[Danzig36]

Simplistic Brilliance!!! Thank you for sharing. You are my "Youtube muse" for the day

[tetuingtuingen]

suck in noise..

[noradosmith]

daisy, daisy.......

[Bobabol]

Apparently if we could all sit an empty room and be happy it would put an end to violence

[AyumuVanguard]

I think this is very fun, but I'm not the only one who finds it a bit ironic that his speech itself becomes smoothed out but the "irregularities" are still left?

[Arel999]

Interesting... the cadence of his voice, if not the original sounds, is preserved in the final product. The resonant frequency of the room is amplified when we are talking- that's what he was trying to get. So thus, the frequency wavers and pops in and out in the same pattern as his original speech. I think he must have purposely measured the way he was speaking for this project.... it's all very shaped. Purposeful.

[Arel999]

Interesting... the cadence of his voice, if not the original sounds, is preserved in the final product. The resonant frequency of the room is amplified when we are talking- that's what he was trying to get. So thus, the frequency wavers and pops in and out in the same pattern as his original speech. I think he must have purposely measured the way he was speaking for this project.... it's all very shaped. Purposeful.

[Dirchekc]

Don't care at all whether or not it's music, it's interesting. That's what I think he was going for when he made this.

[TheLittlevoice70]

(I'm albiegit)

1. full of pretense or pretension.

2.characterized by assumption of dignity or importance.

3.making an exaggerated outward show; ostentatious.

The term 'pretentious' is derogatory. I can't understand why I should apply a derogatory concept to any important achievement.

I'm surprised and pleased that my comment got so many people liking it. But I didn't write it because I'm pretentious, I wrote because I love this beautiful piece. Approval is just an unneeded nice side effect.

[fghjtythgjfgyury]

try Latino women and success your life rockmycity.info

[enigma19833]

I fapped.

[noradosmith]

@enigma19833

but i came.

[IsabjCobsddh]

Travel around the world with and Russian women gettop5.info

[MariusChamberlin]

And also, how did you get a recording of the G-Man from Half Life?

[acdeeds]

@MariusChamberlin haha

[MariusChamberlin]

Not music. 

[Karlfalcon]

@MariusChamberlin

Says you.

[fanatsy15]

Interesting. I leave this video thinking two things;

- Is the "voice" of the recorder accounted for?..in terms of the production of the ending product..

- Hopefully I didn't just get my brain rewired..

[alarik95]

he scary

[SkybirdX]

great experience, i just got a little intimidated by the sound because it seemed like my headphones were gona die from the 5th minute or so, the sound started to get very f´ed up at that time and the phones started somehow to shake, im happy they made it through the whole thing.

[SkybirdX]

wow my ears are bleeding.

[Quartrez]

This is not the resonance. This is aliens trying to communicate with us through Lucier. At least, that's what UFO freaks would think.

[brittainman]

i dont get it(stupid!)

[frankensteinmoneymac]

@brittainman Yes...quite correct. You don't get this because you are stupid.

[MicWings06]

This...is scary...

[FranklinCrew]

This is phenomenal.

[JamieJamez]

Gman?

[BiznessMan]

@JamieJamez I thought the same thing too

[mrmystifier]

Re: rajaftroll & pianoshootist

Yeah he had a stutter, and a result of doing this piece was to "systematically erase his vocal tic, leaving only wordless tones behind."

[jamesjonesrocket]

i think gareth gates did a cover version of this :)

[mindexploration]

cool idea, would categorise it as 'sonic art' rather than 'music' though, personally.

but hey, that's all a matter of opinion

x

[mindexploration]

*awesome idea

x

[Outsider2585]

Fantastic.

The destruction of the words, the changing phases, the ressonance....Almost post modern piece.... great...In the final, the only thing that rests, is the "true"....great, the "Skeleton" from theses words, or something like that

Thanks for share this!!!

hugs

[daniellucier]

sound changes everything

[PowersWithin]

I got to meet him today at our university. He is an inspiration.

[BACHINA123]

Hell yeah i jam to this song in my car every day.

[eslubin]

@BACHINA123 lol

[UncleBert9731]

Oh this never grows old for me. It's SO NEAT!

[BlackNoir]

"Music" for the Pretentious art-school crowd..

Did you listen to this while admiring Andy Warhol paintings, you overrated assholes?

[kirienocthorn]

Aww did somebody take your crayons away as a child?

No need to be so antagonistic.

[rednoise0]

BlackNoir bloviated: "Did you listen to this while admiring Andy Warhol paintings, you overrated assholes?"

I'm not aware that anyone here has been rated. But I now give you a rating of D, for Dim.

[stevnricke]

yeah totally, mayne. way to bash these fuckin FAGS!!!

I hate to clarify this, but i'm not serious

[xaznacex]

Yeah seriously. TCS can suck my black salty (#*$

[albiegit]

Pretentious?

There's nothing pretentious in what Lucier did. It was an intimate personal struggle that oozes strong understated feelings, and at the same time a major experimental breakthrough.

Pretentious is someone pretending to judge a masterpiece without any kind of knowledge or empathy, and contemporarily trying to define the confines of music like a fearful and mindless conservative would do.

Just the opposite of what Alvin Lucier did. He opened himself to the world and won.

[wfly81]

@albiegit

Yea you're right, he's not being pretentious...but you sure as hell are.

[wfly81]

@albiegit

Yea you're right, he's not being pretentious...but you sure as hell are.

[ryanmshepard92]

@albiegit In my opinion, there's no such thing as a non-pretentious concept. Why do musicians play music? Why do inventors invent? Why did Alvin Lucier do this experiment? Why am I posting this YouTube comment? To get attention and approval of other people. There's not a single thing you can do that's not pretentious if you are doing it in front of an audience. Calling something "pretentious" is a stupid argument because the person making the argument is, ironically, being pretentious.

[Healthypig1423]

@albiegit

You win the internets.

[bitachar]

what a strange and beautiful beauty

[EnoAmbient4]

I remember listening to this on the radio late one night and being transfixed. Along with the cool concept, you have to acknowledge the low key, self effacing manner of his delivery and choice of words.

[bardamu61]

I recommend to listen the cd whose the time is 45', it's wonderful, really ! Since i have this record i can't to pall on one.

[gkjoukov]

its quite amazing

[jimjurtz]

Listening In, Feeding Back

Date/Time:Fri., February 13, 3:00pm, Fri., February 13, 8:00pm, Sat., February 14, 9:00am

Price: free

Friday night concert features Alvin Lucier performing his famed electro-acoustic piece "I Am Sitting in a Room," in which he chants those words, then plays back and re-records them until only the resonant frequencies remain. And now you can sit in that room!

[jimjurtz]

wowowowowowooow

imaginable resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech.

i regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but to smooth out any irregularities that my speech might have

[martinallegra]

thanks a lot for sharing.

appreciated.

m

[BarrySeroff]

I don't think you can overlook the importance of the text in this piece.... when he mentions the irregularities of his speech, he is talking about his stutter. So, on one level, we are listening to Alvin deal with his disability by making it into art. It's... really beautiful on that level.

[DarkAndMartyr]

ye this is awesome iv been listening to this in lectures :P

[flybynightvideo]

What are we seeing? "I am sitting in a room, being played back on a 1975 Motorola CB radio..."

[spinmedown169]

Okay, I understand WHY this is important...but I mean....in my honest opinion, this is boring.

[hubblebubbly]

thanx

[hassumies]

Cheers for this.

Been reading Words and Music by Paul Morley where he talks extensively about just how important this piece is. Fantastic to hear it at last. Book is written in the best tradition of overly pretentious music journalism and is a great read.

[cheek]

fuckin nice concept...

[westsalemcongress]

Great post. I run a radio show here in Cleveland on WRUW called I Am Sitting In A Room and I start my show off each week with his speech from this piece.

[rajafTROLL]

why does the sound stutter sometimes? is that how he talked or is it explained by this ressonance cascade thing?

[pianoshootist]

he did stutter

[stephansawesome]

@pianoshootist *does stutter

[saxmanmax]

@pianoshootist he does stutter, still alive and well

[Harpster69]

@pianoshootist yeah, your right, he did stutter... it wasn't intentional as he has a stutter and the distortion of it being re-recorded is a way of cutting it out of his speech, a guess it was a sort of therapy for him... kind of sentimental really...

[MisterSpankyPants]

@rajafTROLL He would actually record himself as a part of speech therapy to prevent stuttering.

[MrxandBadAs]

@rajafTROLL that how he talk

[kernelhead1]

Good job Pianoshootist. This piece makes my ears appreciate everything we cannot hear...Lucier seems like a great man.

[keoma76]

So simple, so brilliant. But it seems to be not so understandable for anybody.

[ortzinator]

it would've sounded very similar if he recorded silence :/

[pw3uk]

Not at all, there would have not been any speech to have been modulated by the acoustics of the room to present any properly audible effect.

[bluesrunthegame]

At all, there would have been surface noise from air current against the microphone, tape hiss, saturation, wow and flutter, and many other entropic phenomenon.

[jf88penguin]

that is so cool

i want that

[DOSphantom]

Rerecord some audio in a room with echoing acoustics(your bathroom?).

[pw3uk]

That's not what he did

[tomatokatsup]

...I think it is, he recorded his voice in a room, and then played the recording back into the room while recording it again. He repeated that over and over. So there you go

[ochyming]

One of the landmarks compositions of 20th Century.

[juliet719]

AWESOME!!!!