Listening spaces

Composer John Cage’s 4’ 33” (1952), a “performance” of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, is recognised as “haunting” the late twentieth century soundscape. Since January, Piaras Hoban and Áine Mangaoang, two postgraduates in the Music Department, University College Cork, have facilitated weekly listening sessions. Each week, participants are invited to contribute a sound piece to be listened to by the group. This communal listening experience focuses concentration on hearing what is being listened to and thereby making the act of listening more sensitive.

The pieces listened to so far have been Automatic Writing (1979) by Robert Ashley, I Am Sitting in a Room (1970) by Alvin Lucier and Ghosts I-IV (2008) by Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails). While each piece is different all attempt to evoke and shape an atmospheric sonic space.

Sounds of vacant space
For John Cage, there is no such thing as absolute silence. It is a relative phenomenon. This perception endures. Cage’s pervasive philosophical intent marked a departure point for a recent symposium of noise and silence hosted by the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, in December 2008 at which David Toop spoke. At the symposium’s opening, Alvin Lucier’s sound piece, I Am Sitting in A Room (1970), was played. Lucier’s compositions explore the physicality of sound moving through space (Toop, 2005). In Lucier’s I Am Sitting in A Room, the composer, recorded himself narrating a text, and then played the recording back into the room, re-recording it. The new recording was then played back and re-recorded, and this process was repeated until eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself. For Lucier, the climactic point is when “speech goes from intelligibility to unintelligibility, or from words to music. What’s beautiful”, says Lucier, “is that this point is different for each listener; it’s kind of a sliding fulcrum on a moveable time scale” (Lucier, 1995, pp. 92, 94).

References
Lucier, A. (1969). I am sitting in a room. (original recording)
Retrieved January 11, 2009 from http://www.ubu.com/sound/lucier.html
Lucier, A. (1995). Reflections: Interviews, scores, writings 1965-1994. MusikTexte: Köln.

For more details visit the Listening Room blog.

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