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.
I Am Sitting in a #$%#%^! - Nick Seaver and the Summer Sound Class
Related to the last post. A version of I Am Sitting in a Room where the max patch failed so the looped audio is: a few of the students saying “I am sitting in a room,” some silence, me hitting my head on the desk, and the kids laughing.
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.
