I'm wearing earplugs right now, so I can't hear anything. . .except I can, and I hear a lot. I hear the tinnitus in my ears, which is a little bit different in each ear. Unless I hold my breath, I hear the air moving in and out. I hear the low-pitched pulse of my blood flowing, and I hear the high-pitched tone of my nervous system working (I'm not imagining this, it's real).
What I'm hearing is far from silence. We can never experience silence.
John Cage had an epiphany when he discovered this fact. He wanted to remove music and get to the bottom, the silence that we supposedly make sounds over top of to create music. But this silence is a myth. John Cage wanted to experience silence, or the closest thing to it, so he visited an anechoic chamber. He sat in there in stillness with open ears, and he heard a lot of sound. He heard the sounds that I already mentioned, the flow of blood and the electrical whine of the nervous system. He discovered that we never experience silence, that there is always sound to hear if only we open our ears to it. He composed "4'33"", the "silent piece", because it would make people realize that there is an infinite variety of sound to experience, even before someone plays a musical instrument. The most important fact in the experience of music, is listening, listening to sound. One of John Cage's goals throughout his life was to simply get people to listen to sound, sound as it is, sound itself.
Yesterday I "performed" "4'33"" by myself in my bedroom. I even recorded it to my computer. I had two amplifiers connected to my computer, and a microphone connected to each amplifier. I started recording the input to my computer at the same time that I started a stopwatch. I turned on the amplifiers and the microphones, and I stood with the microphones in my hands and did not intentionally create any sound for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. At the end of the duration, I turned the equipment off and stopped the recording.
Obviously no part of the experience was silent. My computer recorded the sound of my amplifiers turning on. It recorded the very quiet hum of them, and the faint ticking sound that one of them produces. It recorded through the microphones a couple of creaks in the room. And the microphones fed back with the amplifiers. In the middle of the piece, there is some barely perceptible high-pitched feedback, but at the end, as I moved to turn everything off, one of the microphones got closer to the amplifier and it produced some obvious feedback for about two seconds before I shut it off.
29 Mar 2008, 10:58 pm
