Alvin Lucier is one of my favorite composers ever, and his seminal piece I Am Sitting in a Room lends itself nicely for performance/recreation. so, over the years i’ve made not one but two different automation tools for that:
back in the day, when i was using Matlab for research work, i discovered that it actually has an audio processing toolkit with lots of nice features. one of them is a simple framework for VST plugin development. so, i implemented a simple record-playback loop in the form of a plugin and ran it in Matlab’s standalone host, thus generating a progression of the piece.
here’s a video i made with it, in which it’s applied to a part of “steamed hams”:
i-am-sitting-in-a-room-automation.lua
when i recently wanted to perform “I Am Sitting in a Room”, i stopped using Matlab a long time ago. so i decided to use Reaper, my DAW of choice, and use the opportunity a learn a bit about its scripting abilities. turns out, they’re great! not much more to say there. the script is very simple, but still a bit more intelligent than Matlab one; it
also, not in the script, but my Reaper setup uses filtering to avoid amplifying a room’s resonant frequency that is too high or too low.