Anna Stein Ankerstjerne, curator and art communicator http://dk.linkedin.com/in/annasteinankerstjerne/en
Aesthetics of Silence, paper, 2014
Aesthetics of Silence Introduction We all know the sound of silence. Sometimes we even urge one another to listen to it -‐ as if it was a rare anomaly to the norm of a world full of noise. How come we can listen to silence when it is silent?! Indeed; how can we even speak of ‘sounds of silence’ when silence by definition is something that we cannot hear? Why would we have invented the word ‘silence’ if silence did not exist? This enigma opens a brief survey on the aesthetics of silence. It points at the impossibility of silence and the thesis that silence is no less audible or soundless than other vibrations that the human ear can hear. The world is full of sounds so why not explore the possibility that silence is one of them. With the American composer and artist, John Cage (1912-‐92), it is possible to speak, not only of sounds of silence, but also of music of silence. What the ‘Cagean’ aesthetics of silence will show is, that silence isn’t silent at all, and that aesthetics of silence not only involves audible phenomena but a much broader intermedial field.
The sound of silence “Sound is by definition vibrations that human beings can hear.”1 Does this not make silence vibrations that human beings cannot hear? The dictionary has one answer: Silence is “the lack of audible sound”,2 John Cage has another: “There is no such thing as silence.”3
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Sterne, Jonathan. (2003) The audible past. London: Duke University Press. Cited in Vandsoe, Anette. (2011)“Listening to the world: Sound, media and intermediality in contemporary sound art”, vol. 1, no. 1, p.3. 2 Dictionary definition. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/silence; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silence 3 Cage, John. (1958) “Experimental Music”, in idem. (1961) Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, p.8
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