Alvin Lucier in 1969 did a similar exercise, recording his voice and recording that recording over and over. However, while I have taken Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room as inspiration to undertake this project, there are a few differences I would like to highlight.

Firstly, the difference in what is being recorded. While Lucier recorded his own voice speaking about the process of his exercise, I, as mentioned earlier, recorded sounds produced by machines, sounds that exist in our surroundings. These sounds, while they exist as aural objects in their own right, are reduced to adjectives, making them cohere and complete only when one knows the “source” of the sound. This was interesting for me as I was trying to work on the idea of incoherent sounds, where the incoherence/coherence was not being derived out of language but in relation to our senses.

Secondly, the difference in how the recording happened—in other words: the technologies used. Lucier made use of analog technology available in the late 60s, a tape recorder. To produce this project, I have made use of digital technology readily available today to me, a smartphone. Why it is important to flag this difference is because of the difference in the process of recording and also what impact different technologies have on recording—more of which I will talk about later.

And finally, the intention of recording. Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room is known to be a sound art performance and composition made to bring forth and emphasise the characteristic resonance or formant frequencies in the room he was sitting in, to the point that only the “pure” resonant harmonies and tones of the room can be heard, while his narration gets obscured and unintelligible. On the other hand, this creative project is not meant to be a sound art piece but a mere experimentation and my intention behind using the voice recorder present in my smartphone was to investigate the belief that digital technologies are supposed to smoothen out distortion and incoherence in the recording process.