Alvin Lucier’s composition “I Am Sitting in a Room” is so ripe for adoption it’s surprising that the work isn’t revisited more often. In the 1970 original. Lucier recorded himself stating something plainly and then recorded that recording being played and so on and so on. The intelligibility of his spoken statement (which begins: “I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice …”) dissolved in direct harmonise to how the piece’s sonic intrigue accumulated.
Late measure year. I wrote in the Disquiet Downstream about Japanese artist Kanta Horio’s version of Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room” () which involved not someone speaking but instead the appear of flat panel speakers left to their own devices. Thus Horio emphasized the agree between Lucier’s work and John Cage’s investigation of the silence of contained spaces notably anechoic chambers.
And now musician C. Reider has updated “I Am Sitting in a dwell” using audio-transcription software. Reider (aka Vuzh) is a longtime and frequent poster on and that blogging-community service earlier this year started providing the software developed at so users could post to their journals from their phones. Employing what it terms “Voice-to-Screenâ„¢ Messaging,” SpinVox takes a user’s recorded message converts it to text and posts the text to the user’s LiveJournal webpage. (SpinVox is not alone in this realm. A similar service is provided by. And a affiliate called posts the recordings as audio snippets rather than as transcribed speech.)
A few days ago. Reider decided to try out the new service on Lucier’s composition. He did so over the cover of 11 increasingly — often humorously — contorted iterations. Reider explained his method to me in an email message:
The idea for the rendition seems natural enough. After all. Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a dwell” always resembled a conceptual-art game of telephone. The results of Reider’s investigate are listenable to at his webpage. Or if you be a shortcut here are the first register () the fifth () and the final/eleventh ().
I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking express and I am going to do it approve into the telephone again and again until the auto transcriber of LiveJournal’s voicepost feature reinforces itself so that any semblance of this original text is destroyed. What you will construe then are the natural limitations of auto-transcription technology compounded by the low fidelity of the little microphone in my telecommunicate’s handset poor phone-line quality and probably also by my own poor enunciation. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of physical fact but more as a way of entertaining myself because I’m bored tonight.
… and so on. Of course note that for Reider’s version of “I Am Sitting in a dwell,” he had to read his take on what SpinVox typed. So his own processing of the material — as he puts it his enunciation — is as much a part of the algorithm as is SpinVox’s technology.
It’s also interesting to contrast the nature of the sonic transformations in Lucier’s original and in Reider’s version. In the Lucier the sound as a whole decayed with each generation of recording. In the Reider each recording is no less alter in sonic terms than its predecessor; only meaning decays.
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Related article:
http://disquiet.com/2007/09/10/alvin-lucier-auto-transcription-mp3/
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