A few years ago I ran across composer Alvin Lucier’s work “I Am Sitting in a Room”.
I thought that this was pretty cool, though excessively long. I’ve thought that it would be interesting to reproduce it, just for fun. Since the Makery is in a large multi-chambered concrete basement, it has some interesting acoustic properties.
So on Saturday I took my laptop down and plugged it into a little stereo and a USB microphone from the parts box at the Makery and tried some very simple re-recording experiments.
While I was doing the recording inside the Makery we noticed that the drywall was resonating fairly strongly, enough to rattle the array of hard disk platters hanging from the corkboard on that wall.
For recording I just used the Windows Sound Recorder. I mistakenly allowed it to save in the default WMA format which made getting the audio into Audacity tedious, since Audacity doesn’t support WMA. For playback I just dropped the WMA files into Windows Media Player.
The work flow was pretty simple. I would listen to the recording to check the levels. If it sounded like it was clipping I’d adjust the volume on the stereo, delete the recording and rerun the one before it. To record I’d just hit play, wait a few moments, then hit record. Wait for the clip to end, then press stop and save the file. Repeat.
The microphone had to be pretty close to the speakers to get enough input level, but it picked up the room sound well enough. It would have been nice to get only the room sound by locating the microphone farther from the speakers, but on the other hand the original signal might degrade too fast to be as interesting to listen to.
The small speakers I was using have some pretty bad panel resonances, and don’t have any low frequency extension to speak of, and I did get some pretty bad clipping in a couple of the samples, so the result is not nearly as clean as it could be, but it’s a good first pass. For the next try I want to use some higher quality speakers and keep a closer eye on the input and output levels to avoid clipping anywhere in the signal path, and hopefully the speakers will be sufficiently constructed to eliminate most of the panel resonances.
A waterfall spectragraph shows the room modes, and how the sample degrades over time, which is interesting, but I want to do a higher quality recording before I post pictures of that.
Anyway, here are links to the clips. The first one is from inside the Makery, the second from the large room outside the Makery.
