There's the ? wider ? meaning of silence...
As Cage has been mentioned, there's the fact that we cannot experience
silence as such because when all sound is excluded from our ears then we
hear our bodies processing our lives. When we can't hear that, we can't
hear anything.
I speak of a favourite place I go to as a place of silence although it is
really quite noisy... sea breaking on shores, and almost countless birds
calling
What there is not is human sound for the sake of it.
And there's something I picked up from hearing the Canadian composer Barry
Truax speaking earlier this year. That in a "natural" environment, i.e.
where evolution has been at work without the hamfisted improvements we
bring, then the indigines of all species find their own bit of the audio
spectrum and can be heard by each other and ignored by most other
species... The point as I heard it is that natural selection is a lot
better at orchestrating the sound landscape than we are...
A representation of the evolved spectra is "a work of art" while works of
art are a bit of a dog's breakfast
So when I get on the train back out of the Great Wen, as I am about to,
and I find leaking noise from headphones, I find it annoying both because
there is no need for it to leak and because I suspect the noisy
individuals just can't sit still with the sound of the train and the
passengers
I'll spare you my thoughts on those who think their conversations are
interesting to us - or who just can't grasp that electronic amplification
doesn't need the user to shout
L
On Fri, October 16, 2009 16:15, Douglas Barbour wrote:
> Now, II thought Andrew would have commented by now, quoting Miles
> Davis on the necessity of silence in music. What's between the notes
> being as important as the notes themselves.
>
> Or that silence sometimes between the words, the phrases.
>
>
> Or all the sounds IN the silence, as Cage revealed....
>
>
> Which, yes, perhaps we fear....
>
>
> Doug
> On 16-Oct-09, at 9:04 AM, Patrick McManus wrote:
>
>
>> On Wed, 2009-10-14 at 04:29 -0700, Brian Hawkins wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Perhaps our culture has a problem with silence, including the
>>> silences
>> between words.
>>
>> It is supposed to be one of those golden rules of radio production: no
>> silence allowed.
>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask]
>
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
>
>
> Latest books:
> Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
> Wednesdays'
> http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10
> .html
>
>
> Take away my wisdom and my categories!
>
>
> Phyllis Webb
>
>
--
Lawrence Upton
AHRC Creative Research Fellow
Dept of Music
Goldsmiths, University of London
Lawrence Upton is a Member of The Avant-Offgarde
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