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 Import into BibTeX
Subject: Audio Effects and Physical Modeling
Permalink: https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=16434

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