An analysis of iteratively applied room acoustics used by Alvin Lucier to create his piece "I'm Sitting in a Room" is presented, and a real-time system allowing interactive control over the number of rooms in the processing chain is described. Lucier anticipated that repeated application of a room response would bring out room resonances and smear the input sound over time. What was unexpected was the character of the smearing, turning a transient input into a sequence of crescendos at the room modes, ordered from high-frequency to low-frequency. Here, a room impulse response convolve with itself L times is shown have energy at the room mofes, each with a roughly Gaussian envelope, peaking at the observed L/2 times the frequency-dependent decay time.

Authors: Abel, Jonathan S.; Wilson, Michael J.
Affiliation: Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
AES Convention: 133 (October 2012) Paper Number: 8691
Publication Date: October 25, 2012
Subject: Audio Effects and Physical Modeling

Click to purchase paper as a non-member or you can login as an AES member to see more options.

No AES members have commented on this paper yet.

Subscribe to this discussion

To be notified of new comments on this paper you can subscribe to this RSS feed. Forum users should login to see additional options.

Start a discussion!

If you would like to start a discussion about this paper and are an AES member then you can login here:
Username:
Password:

If you are not yet an AES member and have something important to say about this paper then we urge you to join the AES today and make your voice heard. You can join online today by clicking here.