LITMIR.BIZ

       “I AM SITTING IN A ROOM”

      “I AM SITTING IN A ROOM” (1969)

      for voice and electromagnetic tape.

      Necessary Equipment:

      1 microphone

      2 tape recorders

      amplifier

      1 loudspeaker

      Choose a room the musical qualities of which you would like to evoke.

      Attach the microphone to the input of tape recorder #1.

      To the output of tape recorder #2 attach the amplifier and loudspeaker.

      Use the following text or any other text of any length:

      “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.”

      Record your voice on tape through the microphone attached to tape recorder #1.

      Rewind the tape to its beginning, transfer it to tape recorder #2, play it back into the room through the loudspeaker and record a second generation of the original recorded statement through the microphone attached to tape recorder #1.

      Rewind the second generation to its beginning and splice it onto the end of the original recorded statement on tape recorder #2.

      Play the second generation only back into the room through the loudspeaker and record a third generation of the original recorded statement through the microphone attached to tape recorder #1.

      Continue this process through many generations.

      All the generations spliced together in chronological order make a tape composition the length of which is determined by the length of the original statement and the number of generations recorded.

      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.

       What’s your attitude toward a performance that consists of playing a tape?

      Well, all of us who have made pieces with electronics started with tape because it enables you to play with sounds in ways that no other medium does, but you soon get tired of that because live performances are more interesting than taped ones. Tape led us to discover things about sound that had hitherto been unknown and prepared us to go on and do more interesting things without it, but we always kept tape as a way to store sounds to bring into a live performance.

      Now in “I am sitting in a room,” I didn’t choose to use tape, I had to, because in order to recycle sounds into a space, I had to have them accessible in some form. Tape, then, wasn’t a medium in which to compose sounds, it was a conveyor, a means to record them and play them back one after another in chronological order. Without tape I wouldn’t have been able to do the piece.

      When you worked on materials for the piece, there was never a moment until all those generations had been spliced together that the piece was complete.

      Yes, because the form is linear and cumulative; it changes from generation to generation until it reaches the point of diminishing returns. And it’s funny because if I had consulted an engineer, he or she would probably have found a way to get the end result in one process, one fast process, or one generation. There are ways to by pass erase heads on tape recorders or make large loops which could get the end result very quickly, but I was interested in the process, the step-by-step, slow process of the disintegration of the speech and the reinforcement of the resonant frequencies. Actually, when Mary and I visited the Polaroid Company in Cambridge—Mary, as you know, did a visual analog to the tape by subjecting a Polaroid snapshot to a similar reproductive process—the art director, when he saw the end result, said, “I could do that in one step.” He just didn’t understand that what we found interesting was the gradual process itself. Often, people don’t understand the process. They think that the same speech is dubbed from one recorder to another and each time the quality of the copy degenerates a little bit. But it’s not that at all, it’s playing the speech back into the space. The signal goes through the air again and again; it’s not processed entirely electronically, it’s also processed acoustically.

      You’ve discarded one of the goals of electronic information storage. By reproducing the thing acoustically so many times, all the parameters that manufacturers strive to achieve in their tape recorders, such as linear frequency response, are bypassed.

      Actually, I used two Nagras in the original version. I recorded fifteen generations of the same text and you don’t hear much distortion or disintegration of the tape matter. In fact, the machines did a marvelous job of maintaining it.

      What I meant to say was that an engineer would probably say you’ve done a poor job of reproducing the sound. Of course what you had in mind from the start was to get out of the machines, to submit the material to a purposely non-neutral medium on its way to being re-recorded.

      Yes, the space acts as a filter; it filters out all of the frequencies except the resonant ones. It has to do with the architecture, the physical dimensions and acoustic characteristics of the space.

      As you know, every musical sound has a particular wavelength; the higher the pitch, the shorter the wavelength. Actually, there’s no such thing as “high” notes or “low” notes, we simply borrowed those terms from the visual world to describe something we didn’t understand. A musical sound as it is produced on an instrument, in a column of air or a vibrating string, causes oscillations at a certain rate of speed. For example, the A that an orchestra tunes to vibrates at 440 times per second and can therefore be considered “faster” than the middle C on the piano that vibrates at about 262 times per second. But as those sounds move out into space they can be observed as various-sized wavelengths, so you can see how directly the dimensions of a room relate to musical sounds. If the dimensions of a room are in a simple relationship to a sound that is played in it, that sound will be reinforced, that is, it will be amplified by the reflections from the walls. If, however, the sound doesn’t “fit” the room, so to speak, it will be reflected out of phase with itself and tend to filter itself out. So by playing sounds into a room over and over again, you reinforce some of them more and more each time and eliminate others. It’s a form of amplification by repetition. Thinking of sounds as measurable wavelengths, instead of as high or low musical notes, has changed my whole idea of music from a metaphor to a fact and, in a real way, has connected me to architecture.

      My first impulse was to use various musical instruments playing a wide variety of sounds, but I tossed that idea out because it felt too “composerly.” Instead I decided to use speech; it’s common

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