What do we hear in silence?

CHAPTER 01 / 03

When the expected sound never comes

In a concert hall, watching someone sit down at the piano, we begin listening before the first note. Our ears turn towards the stage along with our eyes. The sound of a chair, a breath beside us, a hum from outside are not yet considered part of the concert. We place them around the thing we are really waiting for.

John Cage’s 4′33″ intervenes in this expectation. Pianist David Tudor first performed the work in Woodstock in 1952. As MoMA’s collection record describes, Tudor marked its three movements by opening and closing the keyboard lid; the sounds of the surroundings were heard in place of conventional piano music. [1] The piano’s silence did not mean that life in the room had fallen silent too.

What interests me here is the way attention changes direction when something falls away. When the sound we expect does not arrive, things we previously pushed into the background can come forward. We are not listening to sounds alone; our habits about which sounds deserve attention are involved as well.

CHAPTER 02 / 03

An interval has a measure

In a 1994 talk, Irwin Kremen, to whom Cage gave the score in proportional notation, explains how distance on the page represents duration. The gap between vertical lines becomes a measure of time. [2] What appears to be empty space holds the duration of the performance.

We can look at the space on a page in a similar way. The interval between two paragraphs gives thought somewhere to pause. On a surface filled in every corner, the eye’s direction seems decided in advance. To me, a useful space is as much about the reader’s freedom to move as it is about the absence of content. This is no formula, though: a sparse page is not always subtle, nor a dense one always tiring. What matters is the relationship between the interval and the text.

CHAPTER 03 / 03

Where attention turns

This does not mean that we must love every sound. Noise can be distressing; people may need somewhere to rest. A work that makes surrounding sounds audible and a person being subjected to unwanted noise in everyday life are different situations. Attention cannot replace the right to choose.

Still, before immediately sorting a sound into good or bad, we can notice where it belongs. A cup meeting a table, a door closing, the brief pause after a sentence: none of these needs to carry some great meaning on its own. They help form the texture of the day.

When we think of silence only as something missing, we keep our ears waiting for the next distinct sound. What might we be missing in between?