[1.5.06] Research Progress 3.0

I'm gradually finding my way back to the subject of Lucier in my research, though for the past couple of weeks I've been entertaining myself with some divergents. Readings have involved Trevor Wishart's On Sonic Art and R.Murray Schafer's The Tuning Of The World. And music courtesy of Robert Ashley's She Was A Visitor and Automatic Writing , as well as a piece by Kate Donovan called Airvent.

These works contain subjects that relate strongly to the aesthetic of Alvin Lucier - particularly sonic acoustics and morphology (Wishart), environment (Schafer, Donovan) and performance (Ashley.)

I have also become very interested in phonetics (the study of speech sounds.) The performance of Ashley's She Was A Visitor at the last Tyndall Assembly concert is a fair indicator of this interest, leading me to read Wishart's studies into the phenomena, as well as examing the work of Dada poet Kurt Schwitter (1887-1948), who was the first artist to seriously explore phonetics in poetry.

This interest in phonetics could provide a good point of reference when examining works by Lucier that employ the human voice in performance, such as I Am Sitting In A Room (1970), For Baritone and Slow Sweep (1983) and Wave Songs (1997.)

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1. Wishart, Trevor. On Sonic Art. ISBN 0 9510313 0 9, 1985.
2. Schafer, R.Murray. The Tuning Of The World. Random House: New York, 1977.