Alvin Lucier

Music on a long thin wire (1977)
a continuous musical installation for a-non proscenium space:metal wire attached to two tables with clamps, wood or metal resonant bridges, a large magnet sine-wave oscillator, amplifiers, microphones and loudspeakers
AL: On other occasions his music has been inspired by brain waves, conch shells and the nocturnal flight of bats. As music became more material, sculpture adopted musical qualities.

I'm sitting in a room (1970) (about resonance frequencies of the room)
I'm sitting in a room, for voice and electromagnetic tape. Necessary equipment: 1 microphone, 2 tape recorders(2 Nagras in 1980), amplifier, 1 loudspeaker.
Choose a room the musical qualities of which you would like to invoke. Attach the microphone to the input of tape recorder n°1. To the output of tzpe recorder n°2 attach the amplifier and loudspeaker. Use the following text or any text of any length:
"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 reinforece 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 articulate 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 regularities my speech might have."
Record your voice on tape through the microphone attached to tape recorder n°1. Rewind the tape to its beginning, trnsfer it to tape recorder n°2, play it back into the room through the loudspeaker and record a second generation of the original recorded statement through the microphone attached to tape recorder n°1. Rewind the second generation to its beginning and splice it onto the end of the original recorded statement on tape recorder n°2. Play the second generation only back into the room through the loudspeaker and record a third generation of the original recorded statement through the microphone attached to tape recorder n°1.
Continue this process through many generations.
All the generations spliced together in chronological order make a tape composition the lenght of which is determined by the lenght of the original statement and the number of generations recorded.
Make versions in which one recorded statement is recycled through many rooms.
Make versions using one or more speakers of different languages in different rooms.
Make versions in which for each generation, the microphone is moved to differnts parts of the room or rooms.`
Make versions that can be performed in real time.
RESULT: The space acts as a filter; it filters out all of the frequencies except the resonant ones. It has to do with the architecture, the physical dimensions and acoustic characteristics of the space. Every musical sound has a particular wavelength; the higher the pitch, the shorter the wavelength. Actually there's no such thing as "high" notes or "low" notes, we simply borrowed those terms from the visual world to describe something we didn't undezrstand. A musical sound as it is produced on an instrument, in a column of air or vibrating string, causes oscillations at a certain rate of speed. For ex, the A that an orchestra tunes to vibrate at 440 times per second and can therfore be considered faster than th middle C on the piano that vibrates at about 262 times per second. But as those sounds move outinto space they can be observed as various-sized wavelengths, so you can see how directly the dimensions of a room relate to musical sounds. If the dimensions of a room are in a simple relationship to a sound that is played in it, that sound will be reinforced, that is, it will be amplified by the reflections from the walls. If, however, the sound doesn't "fit" the room, so to speak, it will be reflectedf out of phase with itself and tend to filter itself out. So by playing sounds into a room over and over again, you reinforce some of them more and more each time and eliminate others. It's a form of amplification by repetition. Thinking of sounds as measurable wavelengths, instead of as high or low musical notes, has changed my whole idea of music from a metaphor to a fact and, in a real way, has connected me to architecture.(Every room has its own melody, hiding there until it is made audible).
AL AL teaches in the World Music department at Wesleyan University. In 1966 he co-founded the Sonic Arts Union with composers Bob Ashley, David Behrman and Gordon Mumma and, from 1972 to 1977, was music director of the Viola Farber Dance Company. In his works AL has investigated the notation of the performers' physical gestures, the use of brain waves in musical performance, acoustic characteristics of architectural spaces and the vizualisation of sound in vibrating media.

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