Alan Kay Creates Accidental Audio Feedback Loop During Kristen Nygaard Birthday Celebration

Alan Kay performed an improvisational audio feedback loop during a live online celebration of Kristen Nygaard’s 100th birthday, an event originally intended for him to discuss how encountering Simula sparked his early thoughts about objects. During the setup, a live stream was played out loud near an open Zoom microphone, causing Kay’s voice to return to his ears with a 21-second delay. This technical glitch resulted in Kay repeatedly stating, "Shannon gave us a way of dealing with noisy channels," and noting that he thinks about this concept almost every day. Kay joked that the delay was equivalent to being rerouted to Mars and back, though the content notes that at the speed of light, a 21-second round trip is approximately 3 million kilometers one way, which is eight trips to the Moon and back but not even a twentieth of the way to Mars at closest approach.

The incident is described as an accidental Zoom performance of Alvin Lucier’s 1969 piece "I Am Sitting in a Room," a work where the artist re-recorded his own voice until only the room's resonance remained. In Kay's case, what remained was the network, characterized by delay, compression, and dropouts. The audio chain involved Kay’s voice, Zoom, the stream, the room, Zoom again three times, a screen recording, YouTube’s speech recognizer, and a censored transcript where YouTube’s auto-transcript bleeped Kay’s enthusiasm. The suggested fix for the issue was to turn off the audio at the end of the Zoom call.