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

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