This week in class we spent quite some time discussing the
relationship between silence and noise through the work of John Cage. When thinking about silence and noise many
people may see them as purely opposites.
It seems like a common generalization that you can either be silent or
you can noisy, but you cant be both. But do we really find this to be true? Can it be possible to be silent but noisy at
the same? John Cage says in his Lecture
on Nothing “what we require is silence, but what silence requires is that I
go on talking.” These seemingly contradictory statements make perfect sense
when we branch out from the conventional definitions of silence and noise and
delve deeper into what these words actually entail. Cage in the above line
wants to achieve silence in room filled with a bunch of people. This goal can
only be accomplished if he makes “noise” by speaking so that the people are
paying attention to him and not talking among themselves. But does this achieve
“silence” in its truest form? To answer this question we have to consider what
exactly Cage defines “silence” to be. To him it could simply be the absence of
incessant conversations and he believes that if he continues to talk and
lecture then the people around him will cease their conversations and listen in
silence. Silence could mean a number of different things and each of its
definitions carries a different relationship with “noise”
When contemplating what silence actually means to me I come
up with one main definition: the sound I hear when I am in the reading room in
the Woodruff Library. Some people might say that the whole point of “silence”
is to hear absolutely nothing but to me this is not the case. Silence has a
coexisting relationship with “noise.” For example, when I step into the reading
room on the fourth floor of the library I immediately become extremely
self-conscious of the sounds my shoes are making as I walk and I begin to
notice how loud computers actually are. I also realize that when an individual
turns a page in a textbook it makes a very distinct sound or how annoying it
can be when someone is unconsciously tapping his or her foot on the ground. In
an otherwise “normal” setting where silence did not exist, I probably would never have noticed these “noises”
but it was the “silence” that amplified the humming of laptops and the flipping
of pages. This shows that silence and noise have a unique relationship where
one cannot exist without the other. The silence
makes us aware of noises that used to go unnoticed. So can we really say that
silence is the opposite of noise or do we believe that silence is just one type
of noise?
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