I am Walking in a Room, Audio Art And Revealing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_Room: Thisis the single line emailed to me by Stéphane Claude, head of the audio sector at Oboro,1 1  - Oboro is a Montréal centre dedicated to the production and presentation of art, contemporary practices, and new media. hours after I described to him a small experiment I had conducted the night before. I had recorded my footsteps in Oboro’s large exhibition space. I then played this recording back into the room while simultaneously recording this new version. I repeated this process ten times. The recording became longer with each iteration, and slowly morphed into an insistent, almost synthesizer-like tone or chord. I later learned this was due to the resonant frequencies of the room itself, which are amplified with every “take.”2 2  - See www.oboro.net/chapman for audio recordings.  Claude’s email good-naturedly pointed out that I wasn’t the first to try this. Alvin Lucier had done the same thing in 1969 with his work I am Sitting in a Room.

My experiment was part of a research and writing residency on the concept of audio art that I conducted at Oboro during the summer of 2011. During this time I sifted through Oboro’s large archive of documentation of audio artworks that have been presented or created there. I consulted publications, press releases, and web materials. I also conducted short interviews with a half-dozen Montréal-based audio artists with links to the centre. My recording initiative was a way of investigating what it would be like to create and present audio work at Oboro, noting especially the expansive, reverberant qualities of its grande galerie. In the end the process revealed something unexpected: evidence of the “colouration” of reflected sounds that occurs while we move through interior environments.