Sitting in a Glory Daze Room

Notes: I started out goofing on a version of “Sitting in a Room” by Alvin Lucier. It is a legendary 1969 audio experiment with cascading repeating audio loops (at the time played from one tape recorder into another), and eventually it descends into pure noise.

Production note: I was using my home microphone, and the initial levels were a little low. So I used the handy “Normalize” effect in Audacity to beef them up a little. I prefer this approach to simply boosting the volume level, as it doesn’t increase background noise quite so much.

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And sorry about the self-indulgent music for the send-off. Here was where it was recorded:

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Transcript

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’m going to play it back into the room again and again until 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.

I’m not going to do this anymore. I was reading the text of the audio experiment called “Sitting in a Room” by Alvin Lucier. And what he does in that is he plays a recording of his voice saying what I was just saying, and loops it back over and over, over itself. And it gets a little more distorted every time. And over about the 20 minute period of the recording… by the end of it, it’s just pure white noise. I’ll link to it in my notes for this post. If you want to hear it, it’s an interesting little piece of avant-garde audio history, but I’m not going to play that recording here. I’m somewhat familiar with how to add and put samples and things like that into a recording. So I’m going to just very arbitrarily pay a piece, er play a piece of music recorded recently in my living room, because for the first time in two years I had a few friends able to be there with me to play some live music in the living room. And I should note that this is the first time we’d ever played this song. It’s not a song we’ve played in the past or rehearsed or anticipated playing, and I think that’s evident from the rowdiness of it, but hopefully the fun of it will be there too. And it’s just really bunch of old dudes who’re re-living their glory days. Thanks for this exercise. (Fades out into music, a shambolic cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days”)…