Composer of soundscapes, Alvin Lucier has died at 90

Alvin Lucier, an influential experimental composer whose works focused less on traditional musical elements like melody and harmony than on the scientific underpinnings of sound and of listeners’ perceptions, died, Wednesday, at his home in Middletown, Connecticut, where he had taught for decades at Wesleyan University. He was 90.

His daughter, Amanda Lucier, said the cause was complications after a fall.

Unlike composers who have the goal of painting an aural picture, evoking particular emotions, creating a dramatic narrative or exploring carefully plotted rhythmic interactions, Lucier seemed to approach his works as experiments that might yield unpredictable soundscapes.

A finished work could sound like howling feedback, electronic crackling or — in the case of his best-known piece, “I Am Sitting in a Room” (1969) — a spoken text that with repetition becomes increasingly distorted and overlaid with reverberation until it is transformed into a symphony of dancing overtones.

And though his music was rooted in the physics of sound, variables like the size and shape of the performance space or the alpha wave patterns a performer generates made his pieces sound different from one performance to the next.

Lucier began many of his projects by wondering what kinds of sounds would emerge from a specific process, like tapping a pair of pencils or detecting brain waves. He would then reduce the variables into a single focus.

“My main activity composing is to eliminate many different possibilities in a piece,” he told the producers of “No Ideas but in Things,” a 2013 film portrait of him by Viola Rusche and Hauke Harder. “When I start, I have so many different ideas about how to put the piece together, and I have to work and think hard until I get to the point where only the essential components are there.”

In “I Am Sitting in a Room,” Lucier began by quietly reading a short statement describing what he is doing. “I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now,” the text begins. “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.”

The room’s acoustics, as well as audio distortions that occur when a tape is rerecorded over and over, yields a gradually changing sound in which, after 10 minutes, the spoken text is buried in reverberation and overtones, and unintelligible. During the final section, highpitched overtones coalesce into eerie, slow-moving melodies.