A version of Alvin Lucier's most famous work "I am Sitting in a Room" performed using the world's 'longest echo' (reverberation time). The world record was broken while researching Sonic Wonderland / The Sound Book and is held by the Inchindown oil tank, Scotland. Alvin Lucier's work is an interesting demonstration of room resonance and so I thought it would be interesting to see what it would sound like in the extraordinary acoustics of Inchindown.

The work normally involves saying a spoken phrase in a room, recording that on a microphone before replaying that through the room again and again. So each subsequent rendition has passed through the room many times. What starts as speech is quickly degraded to unintelligble reverberation before ending up as simple tones.

In this rendition, the first recording is within the anechoic chamber at the University of Salford (hence the change in text from the original work). This is then convolved with the impulse response from the Inchindown oild tank to simulate what speaking in the tank sounds like. As the piece progresses, you hear the same speech that has passed, 1,2,3,4,7,11,18,29 and 47 times through the oil tank's reverberation. The speech degrades much faster in the oil tank compared to what happens when the piece is performed in a more normal acoustic.

In this pack I have uploaded both the final mix and also individual sounds from each pass through the room. The number of the file name "e.g. 11" indicate the number of times the recording has passed through the oil tank.

I am standing In the anechoic chamber final mix

Paul Nataraj ~ You Sound Like a Broken Record (Self-Released)
You Sound Like A Broken Record is one of the most distinctly original releases of the year. Playful, sentimental, and nihilistic, it delves into personal stories and unique memories, all held together within vinyl grooves. Fourteen volunteers gave up a record that had special importance in their lives. They were later interviewed and their personal stories were etched onto the surface of the vinyl. The experimental work stands out because of this process, but it’s also an important peek into the mechanics of music as memory, as well as ‘bringing into relief the dialectical position the record plays as both icon of the music industry but also symbol of musical rebellion’. The music has been reconstructed, too, the heart spilling out through the speakers in a fascinatingly disjointed but spirited way. The records are varied: Stevie Wonder, Bowie, Duran Duran, Brotherhood of Man, and Lil Louis are all distorted and rearranged according to personal memory, making this at once a record of intimacy and growth, speaking of the industry at large with million-selling popular records and the industry’s loving fixation on vinyl. You Sound Like A Broken Record opens a ‘productive dialogue between industry, user, artefact, artist, music, and society’. Vinyl hiss never gets old. It holds a special place in the heart, and a digital file can never replicate that. Love shapes this recording – a love for music, and a love for the spice and colour it gave to a moment, affecting someone’s life. It doesn’t get much better than that.  (James Catchpole)
https://acloserlisten.com/2018/12/15/acl-2018-top-ten-experimental/

Bassino Treblinsky aka Bass and Treble aka Trouble On Bass is several acts in one person, drawing influence from everything from noise and drone to house and dub techno, although his signature sound is not restricted to the conventions of those styles and shows his great care for complex atmospheric layers typical of Ambient, swinging grooveness and a flirt with  experimentalism.

A sociologist lost in the interstices of sound. I also love basketball.

I am a Professor of Acoustic Engineering at the University of Salford where I carry out research and teaching focussing on architectural acoustics, signal processing and audio perception. I am also an author and radio broadcaster having presented many documentaries on BBC radio and written books for academics and the general public. Sonic Wonderland (UK) The Sound Book (US) were published in early 2014.

I am standing In the anechoic chamber final mix

Trevor Cox 6