I

The Taiwan’s Ministry of Education Mandarin Chinese Dictionary defines “silence” quite concisely: voiceless. At the same time, the dictionary mentions an ancient idiom – The sharp-eyed see the formless, the sharp-eared hear the voiceless, before there is anything to perceive. Even without signs or references, the sharp-minded can still predict the imminent in this void of soundlessness.

The Oxford English Dictionary offers both the literal and metaphorical meaning of silence – while it refers the state of utter obliteration of sounds and noises, at the same time, it denotes the mental state of rejecting to or relinquishing communication, such as in silent wars or the Cold War of personal and national significance.

Silence, in music theory, refers to a counterbalance to musical sounds within a certain time duration, which creates interference that subsequently sets the basis for the music’s rhythm and structure – whether a xylophone’s timbre or human-voiced melody are all sounds that break the silence.

II

John Cage believes that silence is merely the shift of our attention:

Silence is all of the sound we don’t intend. There is no such thing as absolute silence. Therefore silence may very well include loud sounds and more and more in the twentieth century does. The sound of jet plane, of sirens, et cetera.

In his famous composition 4’33” (“four minutes, thirty-three seconds,” also known as Silent Piece), all those originally unwanted sounds in a concert hall or those considered as interfering the performance turn into music under our attentive listening. When the performer sits before a piano, muting themselves and using only the opening and closing of the piano lid or hand gestures to mark the three movements throughout the duration of the piece, the performer is effectively handing over their centric, privileged voicing position to the audience while simultaneously challenging the long-presumed bodily preset and taste censorship of silence in our cultural history. For instance, in a concert hall, we always can’t help but raise our eyebrows towards audience members who will not stop coughing; when attending concerts, we are in the habit of being petty and hostile towards fans who sing along. However, in 4’33”, all these traditionally unwanted sounds in music performances come together to form a realm of silence, resulting in a momentum piece where the line between artist and audience is blurred. In this sense, 4’33” utilizes silencing – a cultural practice of decentralizing the performer – to give rise to the composition.

However, silencing to Cage is more than just eradicating sounds but also about creating multiple possibilities. On top of attempting to dismantle the definition and construct of a (musical) artwork, he also utilizes silencing to expand the definition of music – by shifting the audience’s focus towards “sounds” themselves. We are no longer transported by sounds to external images such as water fountains or moonlight sceneries or some transcendental references; we become – albeit somehow feeling extremely restless – highly self-conscious of sounds we produce and aware of how difficult it is to force ourselves into silence. By contrast, when silence is merely the transitional moment of our attention shift, “music” (as in art pieces) might be an redundant term that is too narrow and cannot accurately describe our perceptual status.

III

Oscar Heinroth, a late 19th century biologist who specialized in animal behavior, believed that silencing techniques were the first and foremost condition to studying bird sounds –objective and accurate documentation of bird sounds relied on careful removal of environmental noises. Heinroth once joked that ornithologists who feverishly collected bird sounds in the wild were like circus performers, commenting that “whether in nature or in capture, a bird’s behavior does not change.” His observations were not mere wisecracks; in fact, bird sound documentation in the early 20th century was indeed a spectacular product of combining indistinct fieldwork and orderly lab work.

For instance, at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University, in order to counter the overwhelming noises that are as prevalent as air pollution – note that, as observed by Cage, our pursuit for modernity have brought us noises in the process and made those noises clearer than ever – the Lab specifically developed the special equipment “parabola” (which resembles the parabolic disk of an antenna) that gave microphones a pointing function for receiving sounds, enabling them to record sounds from flying birds or birds at faraway distance. Another example is Ludwig Koch, who simply moved his recording studio to the wilderness; to cancel noises, it often required a setup of more than six outdoor microphones, connecting in-van recorders with wax cylinders, while at all times ready to modify the setup to accommodate the movement of birds. Indeed, whether the parabola or the mobile recording studio, spectacles in silencing, or noise canceling, technology are all rooted in the desire for silence – a Sisyphus-like futile attempt – using machines to silence noises created by said machines.

IV

In the past near-three-decade of restless debate over sound theories, one group of scholars (such as Trevor Pinch and Michael Bull) have challenged how sound studies have been dominated by ocular-centrism – whether in terms of linguistic discourse or material disposition. They mostly stand opposite the visual stance when instigating discussions into sounds and hearing, zealously waving the flag for balancing all five senses. Nevertheless, any discussion on comparing sight, hearing, and other senses is susceptible to abstraction. Distinction between senses is oftentimes arbitrarily decided, so is the presence of sound. Perhaps our conception of silence can break free from the dichotomy of “with/without sound;” instead, we could recognize it as the phenomenological shift in the case of attention, or as clear bird sound samples obtained via media technologies, or perhaps more importantly, as unwanted, excluded sounds. Silence – rather than simply summing it up as “soundless,” it might be better to think of it as inadvertent noises that we so often make, sometimes try to inhibit, in our daily lives. It is desire’s repeated self-reference and also a reality that is beyond our semantic network.

However, whether it is the comparison between sight and hearing or the abstract discerning between sound and silence, neither means anything to Cage – for we are incapable of making clear-cut sound art from the visual, just as sound and silence are mere dogmatic training of attention. After all, sound is always at its most powerful when it inadvertently surrounds us without interfering with other senses.