The sound artist and experimental composer Alvin Lucier (1931-2021), best known for his 1969 work I Am Sitting in a Room, was born in Nashua, New Hampshire. In a long, committed practice, Alvin Lucier explored the physicality of sound and extended the possibilities of experimentation in music, helping shape the landscape of avant-garde sound art starting in the 1960s.

He received his BA in composition and music theory from Yale University, and later his MFA from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Between 1960 and 1962, Alvin Lucier went to Rome as a Fulbright scholar. He first met the acclaimed composers and sound artists John Cage, David Tudor, and Merce Cunningham at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice – a moment that pivoted his views on sound.

“Something about it was so wonderful and exhilarating, I decided that I wanted to involve myself in that” he said in a 1998 interview with The New York Times. The sound artist continued to maintain a close personal and professional relationship with John Cage over the years, who highly influenced his own work. Indeed, the 1960s was a seminal decade for sound art and included radical experimentation by the likes of John Cage, Max Neuhaus, and the Fluxists. Alvin Lucier’s role was key in shaping that landscape.

He later rejoined Brandeis as faculty, where he conducted the University Chamber Chorus and directed the electronic music studio. It was at Brandeis that Alvin Lucier met the physicist Edmond Dewan, an adjunct professor and a military man who assisted the sound artist in pioneering the use of brain waves in music and provided the right equipment: the brainwave amplifier — thus creating what is likely to be the first musical work generated by brain waves.

Alvin Lucier taught at Wesleyan University for forty years (where he also the directed the Electronic and Computer Music Studios) before retiring, after which the university hosted a 3-day festival for his birthday and in honor of his work, Alvin Lucier: A Celebration, with film screenings, a symposium, a series of concerts, and an exhibition.

The seminal sound artist passed away recently in December 2021, aged 90. Read on to discover more about Alvin Lucier’s remarkable lifelong contributions to experimental, psycho-acoustic sound art and performance.

THE SONIC ARTS UNION

Alvin Lucier founded the experimental music group The Sonic Arts Union in 1966, along with composers Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and Gordon Mumma, who met one another while working at the lauded ONCE festivals in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Between 1966 and 1977, they toured the U.S. and Europe with live electronic concerts that tended to include four works, one by each of the members (and sometimes including additional works by Mary Ashley, Shigeko Kubota, Mary Lucier, and Barbara Lloyd).

They frequently used homemade electronics in their performances. “In Europe, people didn’t know what the hell we were doing. I mean, imagine somebody walking on stage and making electronic music out of a French horn. Or imagine me on stage playing electrodes on my hands. We were all doing such different kinds of stuff. When I look back on it, I wonder, ‘What did people think?’,” Alvin Lucier confessed in a 2017 interview with ARTnews.

In 2018, the Brooklyn music venue ISSUE Project Room presented a two-day series celebrating the legacy of The Sonic Arts Union’s influence on the formation of a new musical genre, and debuted the world premiere of Alvin Lucier’s Double Helix for four guitars. 

ALVIN LUCIER’S EARLY SOUND ART

Music for Solo Performer (1965)

Music for Solo Performer was created in collaboration with Brandeis University adjunct professor and scientist Edmond Dewan, who came up with the idea and supplied the equipment. This musical work by Alvin Lucier features the performer’s brain waves recorded with electrodes placed on the scalp – the first work of sound generated by brain waves. The waves are then amplified via speakers spread across the room.

Vespers (1968)

When Alvin Lucier discovered hand-held pulse echolocation oscillators (or “Sondols), he made sure to utilise them in his creative sound art works. Vespers is an “echolocation” piece that features performers moving blindfolded across a space, each with a Sondol of their own, emitting pulses that bounce across the walls of the space with echoes to help in orientation. This created what Alvin Lucier referred to as a “sound photograph” of the space.

I Am Sitting in a Room (1969)

Alvin Lucier’s best-known work, I Am Sitting in a Room, features the artist recording himself as he reads a description of the work, which he plays and then records once again. The microphone records the original reading along with newfound sonic nuances from the room; that recording is then recorded once again, and eventually, the snippets of words are turned into percussive noise.

“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 sound artist says. After revealing the work, many spectators ended up creating their own version at home. In 2015, the Museum of Modern Art, New York acquired the work.

ALVIN LUCIER’S IMPACT ON SOUND 

Alvin Lucier’s commitment to sound art and experimentation in sound spanned much of his adult life, starting in the 1960s and totalling more than fifty years. The above three works are some of his earliest (and most famous) works of sound art, but only make up a minuscule fragment of the many, many more pieces of sound art, performances, and publications he’s behind.

For more articles on Sound Art, read about:

• Global Sound Art Exhibitions
• Iconic Works of Sound Art
• Female Sound Artists
• Sound Artists You Need to Know
• Sonic Art: An Overview

Cover Credit: Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images

Writer | Bana Bissat

Bana Bissat is a Milan-based writer who reports on sound art for Sound of Life. She has written for Flash Art, Lampoon, and Cultured. @banabissat