Chambers. Alvin Lucier

Chicago films, I’ve started paying attention to the characteristics of my speech which are original to my personality and don’t sound like anybody else’s; you know I’m a stutterer. So instead of trying to invent interesting speech patterns, I discovered that I have interesting speech patterns anyway; I don’t have to invent them. Of course I have invented, when you think about it. A person who stutters or who has a lisp invents that or makes it up; it’s not put on him from an external source. And while not everyone stutters, everyone has a certain amount of anxiety about speech. I’ve met many people who think they stutter. Bob Ashley, for instance, thinks he stutters. I wouldn’t say so, but if he thinks he does, perhaps a lot of people think they do, and in that case, I feel that I’m in touch with people.

      I am not as interested in the resonant characteristics of spaces in a scientific way as much as I am in opening that secret door to the sound situation that you experience in a room. For example, I made a preliminary version of “I am sitting in a room” in the Brandeis University Electronic Music Studio, a small, bright, somewhat antiseptic room in which I never enjoyed being very much. It was filled with electronic equipment, and one wall consisted of several large glass windows. The resonant frequencies got reinforced very quickly after the fifth or sixth generation, resulting in harsh, strident sounds. But the version I did at 454 High Street, in Middletown, took a longer time because it was a softer, friendlier room with a wall-to-wall carpet and drapes on the windows. When I first moved into the apartment I never dreamed that I would come to enjoy wall-to-wall carpeting, but I soon learned that if you do have it, people enjoy sitting on the floor. After some of the evenings we’ve had there, people have even gone to sleep on the floor, which they would never have felt like doing in the Brandeis Studio. Anyway, the carpet and drapes cut down on the production of the resonant frequencies so they took longer to achieve, but it gave us a more beautiful result. Didn’t we get a different set of intervals in the Brandeis Studio than we got in this room? Do you remember what they were?

      We got two sets of fifths in both of them but they were much more complex in this version.

      Did you notice that tunes seem to start? Every room has its own melody, hiding there until it is made audible. You know, I feel as though we’re in the same situation as composers were when they first began perceiving overtones. Musicians were always aware of their effects, I think, but timbre was mysterious until someone could demonstrate their existence. Now we’re just beginning to compose with architecture in mind, and I’m very pleased to be in on these first experiments.

       Is it an extension of the idea of personal relevance that you chose the particular text you did?

      Well, the text that I wrote and used in the Middletown recording was personal to me, but was also meant for anyone else who wanted to use it. I guess I was suggesting that everyone’s speech has irregularities. I also said in the finished score that other texts may be used. Perhaps that was a mistake because I don’t want what goes into the space to be too poetic. I want it to be plain so that the space becomes audible without distractions; that’s why I decided to describe the recording process so that the audience could more easily understand what’s going on. I guess you could say that the score is built into the performance.

       I’m interested in how far your idea about the piece extends into the mechanics of achieving it. In other words, if someone uses one of the other procedures you mentioned, a loop for example, can you accept that as really the same piece?

      Well, the piece is subject to many versions; I heard of a twenty-four-hour one made in a chapel in Oberlin, Ohio. Now I’ve been asked to make a version for the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka. The Pavilion is a large dome with interesting acoustics, and David Tudor and Gordon Mumma designed the sound system. It has loudspeakers deployed all over the space, arrays of microphones, and a flexible mixing console. I’m planning to use it to pick up and record the voices of the people walking through the Pavilion, and then to recycle them back into the space from many separate loudspeakers. But I must admit that I prefer the monophonic version; it more clearly reveals the features of the processes that I find fascinating. First of all, there is the superimposition of two very simple repetitive processes, tape recording and talking, but the mixture of these two ordinary activities in an acoustic space, with amplification by repetition, yields an extraordinary result, the evocation of the resonant frequencies of the space. Even though the form is repetitive as far as the recording and recycling procedure is concerned, the listener hears something quite different, and that is the climactic point at which the speech goes from intelligibility to unintelligibility, or from words to music. What’s beautiful is that this point is different for each listener; it’s kind of a sliding fulcrum on a moveable time scale. The rate of transformation isn’t constant either. For the first few generations it moves at a seemingly constant pace, then, in one or two generations, the movement speeds up, then slows down again. It seems to operate on its own set of rules. It’s very mysterious.

      When Mary did the visual part, she took a Polaroid snapshot of the chair that I sat in when I made the tape and subjected it to a copying process in which she copied the original, copied that copy, and so on. And because it was virtually impossible to align the copying camera and the pictures absolutely accurately, a slight error in size crept in, so that every time she made a copy, it made the image slightly enlarged. But of course the size of the picture stayed the same so the image began to move off the picture. There was a dark shadow behind the lamp which grew on each reproduction, until finally the fifty-second one is completely black; the shadow behind the lamp grew until it took up the whole image. Some dirt got on the reproductions too, and what you think you see at the end is a star map. And indeed, a friend of mine who was at one of the performances said the last slide looked just like “Job’s Coffin,” which is apparently a part of the stars.

       (HARTFORD) MEMORY SPACE

      (HARTFORD) MEMORY SPACE (1970)

      for any number of singers and players of acoustic instruments.

      Go to outside environments (urban, rural, hostile, benign) and record by any means (memory, written notations, tape recordings) the sound situations of those environments. Returning to an inside performance space at any later time, re-create, solely by means of your voices and instruments and with the aid of your memory devices (without additions, deletions, improvisation, interpretation) those outside sound situations.

      When using tape recorders as memory devices, wear headphones to avoid an audible mix of the recorded sounds with the re-created ones.