Stairwells and Reflections: experiment #1

inspiration:  

Alvin Lucier - "I Am Sitting in a Room" in which he reads the following text:

"I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have."

Original performance audio (1969) available here:

http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/source/Lucier-Alvin_Sitting.mp3

reinterpretation:

GUND HALL north stair @ Harvard GSD, Cambridge, MA in which I read the following text:

"Evacuation

If an alarm is sounded, or an announcement is made, proceed to the nearest stairwell or doorway and walk to the nearest exit and close doors as you proceed. Make sure that people around you are also leaving."

The following images are spectrograms of the first and final recordings in the "Evacuation" series.  In the first image (the original recording) you can see a number of the formants of my voice present as I read.  The second image shows how the resonant frequencies of the stairwell are reinforced until they completely dominate the spectrum.  From this spectral frequency display we can see that the resonant frequency of this particular stairwell is about 200Hz. 

first recording of my voice as heard in the clip above

final recording of my voice as heard in the clip above

Having performed this preliminary experiment, I would like to continue to develop my investigations around this idea of hearing the volumetric quality and natural resonance of stairwell spaces.  While in this first experiment I have used my voice as a way to excite the resonant frequencies of the space, I would like to continue doing some tests on whether solely the ambient sound present in a stairwell might be able to tease out the most essential qualities of the space.  

I would also like to pursue testing this technique in a number of other stairwells as a way to compare the acoustic characteristics of programmatically, and because of code restrictions, to some extent geometrically and materially, similar yet physically distinct stairwells. 

in each situation take note of:
     - dimensions (plan and section)
     - number of floors
     - materials  
     - adjacent spaces (machine room, cafe kitchen etc...)