Selected Writings, by La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela

La Monte Young began to focus on the potential of Sinusoidal waves in 1964 when he integrated an oscillator within The Theatre of Eternal Music. In an interview with Richard Kostelanetz, Young explains the basics of his work around that time. Selected Writings (Young & Zazeela 1969) was first published by Heiner Friedrich in 1969 and republished on UbuWeb in 2004 edited by Kenneth Goldsmith. Much of the writing appeared in the original Aspen Magazine and in it’s digital republication on UbuWeb. The Selected Writings is a concise historical documentary of Young and Zazeela’s collaborative work up to 1969. The second text Dream House describes an installation of light and continuous sine frequencies with occasional singing at Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich. The work is entitled Dream House and is an ancestor of the later works to be permanently installed at Young and Zazeela’s house in New York. Young’s text describes the use of sine waves in the enclosed gallery space;

When a continuous frequency is sounded in an enclosed space such as a room, the air in the room is arranged into high and low pressure areas. In the high pressure areas the sound is louder, and in the low pressure areas the sound is softer. Since a sine wave has only one frequency component, the pattern of high and low pressure areas is easy to locate in space. (Young & Zazeela 1969 p.11)

YOUNG, L. M., & ZAZEELA, M. (1969). Selected writings. München, H. Friedrich. Available at http://www.ubu.com/historical/young/index.html [Accessed 9th December 2007] Republication on UbuWeb edited by Kenneth Goldsmith 2004.