Alvin Lucier – Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas

I’m not usually a big fan of Concept Music, but I really enjoy Lucier’s work. I really appreciate his thorough knowledge of the science of acoustics and the creative way he tweaks it to create interesting effects on both an aural and conceptual level. This disc documents part of a 70s composition dealing with interference patterns in closely spaced sound waves (the “beats” you hear when people are out of tune). For this piece, he’s got several different soloists playing along with sine waves. He has them alter their pitch at regular intervals to create the patterns in the sound, the audio equivalent of dropping a bunch of pebbles into a lake. He uses the different attacks and timbres of the instruments to keep things interesting. As with all of Lucier’s work though, this disc is not for the impatient. The tracks are long and the effects are subtle, but I still found all this to be strangely comforting and addictive. The liner notes give a track by track description of what’s going on, so I won’t go into detail here, but I did particularly enjoy disc 1 track 4 which features a vocalist altering her pitch between two sine waves for an amazing effect.