Vibrations and how they get to your ears.
Noise for airports is a blog about culture, sound, music, and technology.
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Updated (sometimes) by Nick Seaver.
This weekend, my sound class topic was “noise.” The class was split into three parts (in my ongoing attempts to make sure I always schedule in too many things to do): unwanted sound, noise/signal, and linguistic noise. One thing I wish I could have included was a discussion of noise and skill—whether assessments of “noisiness” have something to do with inferring intention, or intention well-constructed. But, time, as usual, was not on my side.
I knew I wanted to try a live version of Alvin Lucier’s extensively discussed I Am Sitting in a Room for the class, so I hunted down a Max patch to do the dirty work for me, adding in a function to record the whole exercise for posterity. I recorded each student saying “I am sitting in a room,” and then got ready to load it as the first iteration in our little recursive performance. (For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, in I Am Sitting in a Room, Alvin Lucier records his voice, plays it into the room while rerecording, then plays that while rerecording, etc. until the recording turns into a room-mediated feedback orgy.)
Technology gremlins punished me for not figuring out how the patch I was using worked beforehand, because the setup that had worked perfectly in my pre-class test totally failed. Well, not totally—for some reason, it played a few of our “I am sitting in a room”s, went silent, I bashed my head on the table (having already screwed it up in a variety of ways before this try, including a version that appeared to change our voices into a mashup of Simian Mobile Disco and Sufjan Stevens all of a sudden…), and the class laughed. Then, it started playing again!
I decided to let it go, and see what would happen. The sound of my capitulating head-desk, laughter, and a bit of speech, went through the feedback wringer, and, for all the catastrophe, was not that bad! You can hear what we ended up with: “I Am Sitting in a #$%#%^!” (I’ll post an audio post version of it after this for good measure.)
I felt like I was the Portsmouth Sinfonia of sound art.
