AA Week 5 - Sound Art

Alvin Lucier
Born in Nashua, New Hampshire, Lucier was educated at various schools growing up, including Portsmouth Abbey School, Yale and Brandies. He also won a scholarship which led him to Rome for two years. He then went back to Brandies at the age of 31 to teach Choir and Performance of new music for 7years. Then in 1970 he also taught at Wesleyan University.
He has invented many types of new ways of expressing music, including the notation of performers' physical gestures, the use of brain waves in live performance, the generation of visual imagery by sound in vibrating media, and the evocation of room acoustics for musical purposes.(1)
His main focus of late involves sound installations for both orchestras and solo instruments, by which he can manipulate the sound waves and make them spin through space.
He has done many performances, like at the ‘Abiko Festival’ in Tokyo, ‘Music on a long thin wire’ in Kyoto, at ‘Time of Music’ Festival in Finland and has even had his own five day festival, appropriately named, ‘Alvin Lucier: Collaborations’.
He has also performed with many famous composers, including Aki Takahashi, DAAD Kunstler, Douglas Simon, John Ashbery (poet), and Robert Wilson.
Here is a link to a related website:
http://www.otherminds.org/shtml/Lucier.shtml

“I am Sitting In a Room”

"I Am Sitting in A Room" is a psycho-acoustic classic by Alvin Lucier for voice and tape. The spoken sentence, talking simply of what he is trying to do, are recorded, then played into a room and re-recorded. And that goes on over and over again, until eventually all you can hear is the resonance of the room, proving his point. As the recording gets played over and over again, the sounds given by the room and the sounds common the spoken statement are reinforced, with all the other noises being eliminated. This is almost like a filter, leaving only the pure sounds.
This song was composed and first performed in the same year at Guggenheim Museum in 1970.

I found this piece fascinating when i first heard it. I honestly didn't even know that this kind of theory existed and thats what could have happened.
I know that Alvin was one of the main composers involved in the evolution of sounds design. Spending almost all of his days dedicated to exploring the boundaries of sound and music, and also teaching others how to think the way he does. Feeling compelled from a young age, Alvin has changed the way many think about sound and music.