The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

In Music for Solo Performer (1965), Lucier made himself a kind of mind-control test subject by attaching electrodes to his head and broadcasting his brain’s alpha waves to loudspeakers around the room, the low-frequency tones causing nearby percussion instruments to vibrate. For I am sitting in a room (1969), Lucier recorded himself reciting the following text: “I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed.” The piece simply enacts that process.