I Am Sitting in a Room is a piece by experimental composer Alvin Lucier that involves him recording himself reading something, which is played into a room, recorded, played back, etc., resulting in degradation of the words until it's just electronic drone. The paragraph he reads is below:
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.
Now when discussing this piece, people tend to focus on the physicality of the performance, which is certainly striking. The way in which the words melt away into just room tone and drone, the way in which sound is contingent and not anything more than vibration that can be manipulated. However, thinking of this piece in only this way is ironically counter to the very statement Lucier is reading. As he says, "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."
See the thing is, Alvin Lucier had a stutter his entire life. And with this knowledge, and with the paragraph itself, it's easier to think through this piece not just as about the physicality of sound, but as about the way in which disability uproots the traditional way of looking at things. Alvin Lucier, with a stutter, reads out a piece that is in part about his stutter. It is not just vague intellectual interest in sound that brings him here, it is his direct and embodied experience with deviation from the norm in speech and sound. And his stutter is indeed smoothed out, as he says, but only by it being utterly annihilated, by the man's voice itself being torn apart until it is just the empty drones of a room.
and, to add a metatextual irony, Lucier stopped stutering entirely when reading the text, after a point, because it became well known enough that he performed it frequently. Do what you will with that.
wrote about one of the most important to me pieces of music out there
