Entry 6: Alvin Lucier – I am sitting in a room

This piece is somewhat of a surreal experience. The text contains the idea, the purpose, and the layout of the piece, but with only the intial cycle of the text, the listener cannot be certain that this is how the piece will unfold. Then the cycle starts again, which indeed confirms the text, and as time goes on it becomes more and more clear that this is the true intention of the piece. The cycle repeats again, and the change is more noticable, and one can easily imagine how the sound will progress, yet it was very intriguing listening to the piece progress. As the piece goes on I increasingly expect a break in the cycle, but just as the piece states in it’s self, it goes on repeating. The words go on and while they become more distorted they begin to make more sense as the listener is experiencing what the text is describing more and more. Will the expectation be meet, will the piece follow it’s premaid layout? I kept my suspicions for as long as possible, that is until the piece ended and it had done so without straying from its predicted path. Just as the text subtly claimed, this is indeed a concept piece, and the purpose, method, and result are all contained in the text as well. I’ve never encountered a piece so upfront about itself, and I believe this was one of the roots of my suspicion. The other being I noticed the potential in upsetting the listeners expectation by deviating from the layout of the piece stated. When put in perspective though, I realize that I was more or less tricking myself rather than the piece tricking me, because there is no denying the how linear the piece and it is apparent to me that it was my own expectations for the piece that were toying with me. I am very curious to know how much of the voice alteration was done through natural acoustic means, and how much electronic alteration was done. From listening to the work I would say it is niether purely natural or purely electronic in the alteration, and if I had to guess I would say the percentage of electronic alteration increases as the piece plays out. Regardless of all this, it was very interesting to hear out the progression of the process in the piece. The Steve Reich piece “Come Out” comes to mind when hearing this piece, but this is probably because it’s the closest thing I’ve heard to this piece. Both the works are minimal in their natures, and consist of altering speech samples, but the intentions, methods, progressions, and ideas of the works are quite different when you get past the surface level. I found to be a very interesting listen, and a great pondering on expectation.