I don’t think anyone has ever considered the default YouTube settings for uploaded content the pinnacle of high quality video, but YouTube user canzona came up with a creative way to see just how destructive it is.  He recorded himself reciting a slightly modified version of Alvin Lucier’s ‘I Am Sitting in a Room‘ and then began the year-long process of uploading it to Youtube, waiting for it to transcode, downloading the result, and repeating it again.

The final video in canzona’s series is a mess of distorted colors and sounds; you can recognize from the motion that the original featured a person talking into the camera, but all individual characters and specifics have been lost, replaced by artifacts created by YouTube’s video and audio compression algorithms.

All 1,000 steps of the process — which took a full year — are available on canzona’s YouTube profile. The project is titled “I Am Sitting in a Video Room,” and it’s inspired by an audio art project recorded by composer Alvin Lucier more than 40 years ago.

I’ve embedded the first and last video in this test after the break, but you can visit his profile to see all 1000 of them.

via What Happens to a YouTube Video After 1,000 Uploads?.

Warning: The sound in the original video is a bit quiet, so you might want to turn up your speakers.  The sound in the final 1000th conversion is likely to destroy your speakers if you don’t turn the volume down.