Listening Blog #1

This week we were assigned two listenings: I am sitting in a room (1969) by Alvin Lucier and Kits Beach Sound Walk (1996) Hildegard Westerkamp. I will start with I am sitting in a room.

This Alvin Lucier piece is a very straight-forward piece that is very clear about its very own conception. The piece consists of a performers voice, in this recording it is Lucier’s own, that recites a short piece of text explaining exactly what is happening in the piece. The voice is recorded and then gets played back to another recorder, then played and recorded again and again. This process is repeated 32 times and, by the nature of audio recording, the voice loses clarity each time. Even halfway through the piece it gets extremely difficult to decipher the original text, and eventually all that can be heard is the whistling resonant frequencies of the room itself. There are odd stutters and “irregularities” in his spoken performance, which eventually gets lost in the droning ambience the voice becomes. The booming noise was hauntingly large, like a cloud. What I found most interesting about the deconstruction, however, was the way that harmonies seemed to emerge. I found it especially powerful to think that somewhere, deep within the noise, was once a comprehensible human voice lost in audio compression.

Lucier notes on his intentions in the text itself: “as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have”, however I don’t think this paints the whole picture. Lucier “smooths out the irregularities” of his voice by deconstructing it, which to me is an example of abstraction clearly brought into practice. By removing sonic clarity from the text more and more, deeper emotions are gradually revealed as resonant harmonies become introduced and the timbre becomes more alien. I see this as the ultimate demonstration of the importance of minimalism and abstract art as a whole.

Kits Beach Soundwalk is a much shorter piece in duration that was made in a very different way. The piece consists entirely of field recordings, but unlike I am sitting in a room, the recordings were extensively edited and arranged together. The piece feels more like a soundscape, and Hildegard Westerkamp narrates throughout the whole thing. She describes, or rather directs the listener’s attention to many of the sounds that the listener is hearing, such as the sound of the barnacles, cars, or trees. She even to some degree explains her own work process, such as using bandpass filters to remove the sound of the city in the background. One moment that was particularly striking to me was when the Mozart starts to play. What was striking about it was the contrast between that sound and the rest of the piece: Westerkamp places the sample in a such a way that it has such a small, singular sonic presence. This opposed to the other audio, which utterly surrounds the listener and completely fills the space it occupies. I think this is one example of a recurring theme in Kits Beach Soundwalk which is meant to reflect on the over-development of modern society, and to bring emphasis on the often overlooked natural beauties of our world.