I am waiting for a train

alvinLucier
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Announcment Tones & Sonic Indeterminancy on the Northern Line, London Bridge Station – Sept 05 – Performed by unidentified Tube Announcer.

For the last few mornings I’ve been amused and intrigued by some great unintentional sonic experimentation emitted from an unlikely source. A tube guard/announcer, with a badly calibrated loudspeaker/announcement system has transformed his voice into, practically, pure tone. Through feedback, or tunnel resonance, or some unknown analogue aberration, his amplified voice had become a set of musical frequencies. To most of the Bluetooth suits on their way to work I suppose this amounts to nothing more than an annoyance, a few ‘knowers’ smiled. Having spent a lot of time orbiting the outer sonic galaxies searching for all sorts strange music, I was happy to hear this and would like to go back and record the ‘performance’.

The nearest approximation to ‘Announcement tones’ is Alvin Lucier’s, incredible piece, ‘I am sitting in a room’. The instructions for producing the piece are, in fact, the piece itself. The composer sits and describes what will happen, and then it happens. Lucier tapes these instructions then replays that tape into the room, tapes that, plays the second tape into the room, etc., and so on. Little by little, the “natural resonant frequencies of the room” erode the source material, softening hard edges, blurring boundaries between words. The excellent UBU has an MP3 of the original 1969 version for download here as well as an interview with Lucier entitled ‘A Sounds Waves Artist’

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