Christopher Burns: Realizations: I am sitting in a room (2 of 2)

With these thoughts in mind, I undertook to make a live realization of Lucier's work in October 2000. I chose to implement the piece using Miller Puckette's Pd software, running on a Linux workstation. The audio processing required is simple, as befits Lucier's elegant conception: the room acoustics do the musical work. The core of the realization is a stereo delay line long enough to store an entire iteration of the spoken text (60 seconds, in my reading). Audio goes into the computer from two live microphones in the performance space, and the same signal is repeated to two loudspeakers in the space 60 seconds later.

The process of repetition and feedback is implemented not in software but "in the room"; the microphones record whatever the loudspeakers project. The principal challenge in setting up the performance space has to do with balance. If the speech increases in volume at each iteration, undesirable distortion and clipping will eventually result. Conversely, if the speech decreases in volume with each repetition, the piece may end prematurely. A soft limiting stage at the input to the delay line helps to minimize the threat of clipping, and to make any clipping which does occur less objectionable. In turn, the reduced threat of overload frees up headroom to prevent decaying amplitude. Attentive volume control remains necessary throughout a performance - not least because a soundcheck in an empty performance space may prove a very different acoustic environment than the same room filled with listeners.

The realization was not only a matter of implementing the electronics and balancing them in the performance space. Another issue to consider was duration, and the appropriate way to end the piece at the point that duration was reached. Unsure of how quickly the process would unfold when the intended performance space was filled with an audience, I opted not to fix the duration in advance. In the event, the transformation was rapid, and I elected to end the first performance at slightly less than thirty minutes. (Without a counter, it becomes difficult to keep track of the iterations, as the text decays in intelligibility and evolves into continuous sound - there were approximately twenty repetitions). Given the difficulty of perceiving where one iteration ended and the next began, I chose the easiest available option for concluding the performance: slowly fading down the microphone inputs. The piece ended in a fadeout 60 seconds later.

Finally, Lucier's score offers the choice of "any... text of any length." In practice, I found it difficult to move away from Lucier's original text. The given text concisely describes the process of transformation even as it undergoes that transformation. Its self-reflexive nature has always formed a substantial part of my interest in I am sitting in a room. And so I chose to use Lucier's text, with a slight variation. The score offers: "I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now." The new realization begins: "I am sitting in a room - the same room you are in now."

At the first performance (10/12/2000), the new realization offered a communal listening experience; generated a palpable activation of the room and the environment; and produced "surprises" in the form of inevitable unintended noises, which knitted themselves into the fabric of the music. It was an opportunity to hear I am sitting in a room with fresh ears.

Quotations from "I am sitting in a room," Alvin Lucier, Reflections, Middlebury: Wesleyan University Press (1969), p. 322-4.

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