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Alvin Lucier made an instrument out of the very thing composers had fought for centuries — the acoustic anomalies of a room. The idea came from engineering: the acoustician Amar Bose, the one whose name is on the Bose speakers, tested his loudspeakers by running a single sound around a loop until their frequency coloration emerged. It struck Lucier that if he sent a human voice through a room the same way, the walls themselves would become the composer. He sat down at a microphone, read a short paragraph, and started the cycle — play the recording back into the room, record it again, dozens of times over.

With each pass the room amplified its own resonant frequencies and smothered everything else. The first loops are still recognizable speech. Then the words swell, the consonants blur, the meaning bleeds out. By the end, not a single word of "I am sitting in a room…" survives — only a shimmering, almost bell-like hum in which the geometry of the space itself sings. The human voice is gone; the room is sounding. The score was that spoken text, and it described aloud its own dissolution.

This overturned the very idea of composition. Lucier arranged no notes and no timbres — he set a condition and handed authorship to physics: in every new room the piece sounds different, because it is written not by a person but by the resonance of the walls. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York took the work into its collection as "a radical reversal of the logic of musical composition." There was a more personal irony, too: Lucier, who stuttered all his life, wrote into the score the hope of "smoothing out any irregularities" in his speech — and the one thing the room could not erase was the rhythm of his stammer.