How The Wrong Noisefloor Changed My Life
Jeff Cloke
About 10 years ago I heard a piece of music that was already 30 years old but which became my obsession for the next 10 years. That piece was 'I Am Sitting In A Room' by Alvin Lucier.
The piece begins like this: Beginning
After a while Lucier's voice has been transformed by the room acoustics into this: 5 min
and so on 10 min 15 min 26 min Ending
As I said, I became obsessed with this piece; both with the technique and the final soundscape. I already had many years' experience as a performer and improvisor, so my instinct was to create a live version of the piece. Having no equipment and even less money I set about improvising an equipment setup. Here is the result: Resonation Tape System
I used this setup to make my piece for the 2002 Dartington Summer School Rooms Have Feelings Too
This result clearly leaves a lot to be desired! The main problems come from the boom and hiss caused by the cassette tape and the automatic level control. Over the next year or so I managed to assemble a more effective setup using a proper microphone and digital delay pedals, which had only just become available: Resonation Apr 04
With this setup I produced my first really satisfactory piece, recorded in a disused Victorian Pumphouse in Hornsey. I wrote a site-specific text, and this approach formed my artistic practice for the next 2 years, 2004 – 2005 Resonation Example
Now going back to Alvin Lucier's piece, he says “I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now...” What he doesn't say is that he is alone in the room, with the doors and window closed, and with the radio and the airconditioning turned off!
In other words, he is operating with an extremely low noisefloor. As I discovered during my 2 years of performing with my Resonation system, this low noisefloor is essential for the process to work. Whenever I performed in a noisy club or in an ensemble with other players the result was simply nothing like the wonderful soundscape that Alvin Lucier's piece produced. Performing solo within a very low noisefloor environment remains something that I do, but it's a bit of a dead end, and doesn't allow me to perform with other people.
As a result I decided to investigate other methods of achieving the Lucier final soundscape, but without using a quiet room as part of the equipment. It took me all of 2006 and 2007 to develop my new laptop-based system which I dubbed Reson8. Reson8
Reson8 uses stored samples of spoken text or live sampling of speech or instuments. These sounds are transformed by a process of spectral stretching akin to the multiple echoes in 'I Am Sitting In A Room' to produce a result very close to that produced in my Resonation system under undeal, low-noisefloor conditions. The difference is that the ambient sounds do not get amplified and mixed up in the soundscape, so a much higher noisefloor is possible. Here is a solo example; you will hear birds singing and people speaking, but these sounds do not upset the soundscape I am producing. Solo Example
As I said, I can also do live sampling as well as working from stored speech samples: Onstage
The final example is exactly what I hoped to be able to do over a decade ago, when I first became obsessed with 'I Am Sitting In A Room'. Live sampling of Adam Bohman's words producing a Lucier-like soundscape: Adam & Jeff
This afternoon I will be giving a solo performance using a single sample of a speech by Roland Barthes given on this day, 12 January, 1977. Not site-specific but temporal-specific in this case.
