In a way, it’s an extension of the things I love about NLP and sound/music in general. I’ve been a close listener since my teens (although certainly never to this degree). A lot is said about music’s power to communicate and convey emotion, but increasingly over last twenty years or so I’ve felt that to be insufficient. For me, there’s seems to be a deeper, more primal joy at noticing sound, of experiencing the effect it has on the body, of noticing in spatial and temporal terms your positionality relative to your environment and what it contains. It’s similar to being blindfolded and asked to feel objects – the senses of touch respond powerfully even without full knowledge of what it is they’re feeling, increasing as more detail is experienced. The ability to notice even the tiniest variations and gradations in each modality is its own reward. You can enjoy a good wine without being an expert, but the further you go into any field of sensory experience the more you notice and the more pleasure you experience. And in silence, or in music that utilises silence or moves close to silence, picking up on the details, in terms of pure sensuousness, can be awe-inspiring.

In NLP you work with people to build sensory models of their experience, asking them how they know they are experiencing their symptoms, an emotion, or a reaction on a sensory level. People pay attention to their senses to varying degrees. They also have varying descriptive capabilities. When you ask a person what they’re hearing, seeing or feeling, one of the most frequent answers is “Nothing.” But it’s exceedingly rare to be experiencing “nothing” – senses tend to be open for input all the time. So you get around that response by asking, “What kind of nothing are you hearing/seeing/feeling?” To get further, you might ask paired questions, splitting each sense up into various axes, similar to the manner in which Aristotle considered the senses. You might ask if a sound is quiet or loud, whether it is panned left or right, in mono or stereo, whether there is one sound or several, if it has a smooth or rough tone (borrowing a kinesthetic metaphor), whether the pitch is high or low, whether the sound source is moving or still, whether the sounds are short or long in duration, whether they’re fast or slow in tempo (the questions are only limited by your imagination). It’s almost always possible to elicit descriptions of experience in sensory terms in this manner.

I’m writing this at work, between calls. There are about thirty people in the office, a general constant hubbub of talking. Sometimes I like to focus on the sharp, sibilant ‘ess’ sounds in their speech to the exclusion of all other details, which turns the room into a whispering, high-pitched melodic forest of minute currents of air forced through the tiny gaps between teeth and tongue. Each of us operates two computers with four monitors and a telephone; there is overhead strip lighting and two air conditioners, one at either end of the office. I’d love thirty minutes alone in this room, just me and those motors and electric currents, without the doors and chairs creaking and banging, the speech and the footsteps. All the sounds are good in their own right, but I’d love to get at those tiny sounds, the minutes drones, buzzes, oscillations, whooshes, whirrs, whistles, sine tones, shimmering together in a technological haze behind everything.

"The concentration in this music is on silence and the way it prepares and resolves sound." Text from the Free Music Archive website, used to describe Edition Wandelweiser

Such a beautiful turn of phrase, with so much fruitful ambiguity and so many overturned assumptions. Who is doing the concentrating is left vague and therefore capable of referring to the entire continuum of composer, performer, improviser and audience (and possibly even the music itself) – all engaged together, in the same act of fixed, intense attention. And the concentration could also refer to a reduction of the material, of boiling it down to its undiluted essence, or a stripping away of the extraneous – a pursuit of elegance.

What I particularly like is its description of silence in the positive as an active agent, a *something*, rather than in the negative as an emptiness or absence. A material to be worked with, rather than the absence of material. Sounds don’t decay into nothing – they are consumed by something. I find that kinda thrilling.

"…it seemed musicians were more interested in discussing Cage’s ideas than his music. For (the composer) Kunsu Shim, the music of Cage, and of those who worked with him and followed in his wake was felt to be more radical and more useful than his writing: because it had so many loose ends and live wires still to be explored. Thus 4’33” was seen not as a joke or a Zen koan or a philosophical statement: it was heard as music. It was also viewed as unfinished work in the best sense: it created new possibilities for the combination (and understanding) of sound and silence. Put simply, silence was a material and a disturbance of material at the same time." Michael Pisaro, composer

Probably the easiest starting point for discussing silence in musical terms, Cage’s 4’33” has been talked about, picked apart, ridiculed and placed on a pedestal more than most 20th Century compositions (in fact, more than most compositions, period). To my mind, it achieves four main things; it’s an example of the concentration mentioned above, an attempt to reduce what constitutes a composition down to the minimum possible instructions; it’s a frame that contextualises all sound as potentially experiential in musical terms, placing an unusually high onus on the listener to accept and receive those sounds as such; it’s broadly automaticist, problematising (rather than merely removing) the role of the composer and performer; and most famously, it’s an attempt by Cage to musically articulate the impossibility of silence in the experiential frame of a human listener, focusing the ear on potentially minute variations in sound that might even come from the listener themselves.

Describing his visit to an anechoic chamber, Cage reported: "I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation." This led him to one of his most famous observations in which he described the biological impossibility of a human being experiencing absolute silence: "Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.” Another beautiful turn of phrase. Cage’s joy at the idea of a music liberated from his own tyranny as listener, composer and performer is infectious.

So apparent silence, rather than being a blank canvas, is already a complex, shifting sound, usually operating outside of awareness until the attention is deliberately focused upon it. In the words of Wandelweiser composer Michael Pisaro, “The music… revealed the complexity of “silence” itself. Silence in music was not the cessation of sound, or even a gesture: it was a different sound, one with more density than those sounds made by instruments.” The Wandelweiser composers collective, along with concurrent movements in contemporary improvisation including Tokyo’s Onkyo scene and the loosely post-reductionist music covered by labels like Another Timbre and Cathnor, have dedicated themselves to investigating silence-as-sound in their material.

At first glance, it might seem perverse to describe silence as possessing “more density than those sounds made by instruments.” As paraphrased by the interviewer Lucas Schleicher from his reading of Michael Pisaro, “The closer a sound gets to silence, the more unstable it becomes” That strikes me as a useful generalisation that describes a few phenomena; a reduction in dynamic range causes increased confusion and cross-contamination between sounds, which no longer have an easily definable foreground/background; quieter sounds are more likely to become confused or partially lost in the decay of an acoustic environment; and there’s an increased difficulty of controlling instrumental timbres at quiet levels which can cause the sound to lose stability or possess increased audible overtones.

In the words of the composer James Saunders, “When bowing a violin string with a very slow, almost static bow, there comes a point where the interaction between the bow hair, rosin, and string creates an uncontrollable sticking, resulting in a series of clicks, noise, and whispered pitches. This is also the case with a lot of the found materials I use (wood, metal, everyday objects), as well as in certain uses of electronic equipment such as radios and dictaphones. There's an internal life to these sounds that have a particular kind of freedom, one which we can't control as performers.

It's also worth saying that this is one of the reasons why most of my music is relatively quiet, and uses held sounds. At low volumes, it becomes harder to discern the differences between sound sources as there's often less evidence of the sonic characteristics you associate with say a clarinet or viola when it is played on the edge of silence. They tend to blend together more, and this is something I try to exploit. I find these sounds beautiful, particularly with regards to their fragility, and try to present them as such.”

I’m drawing on Michael Pisaro quotes a lot here, because he’s a music teacher and is able to describe better than most commentators I’ve encountered exactly why this music can be so compelling. In his own words, “As a composer, I am interested in challenging the ear. This is not in order to be difficult, but because I know that in meeting this challenge, the senses and the mind have the opportunity to experience joy at our ability, based on the most subtle sensory discrimination, to respond. For this reason, my music focuses on a kind of listening which emphasizes the limits of perception: the tiny, practically inaudible variations of sound which occur in an apparently stable tone; the sometimes invisible border between sound and silence; the almost imperceptible sense of time passing; the infinitesimal difference between something which is almost simultaneous and something which is truly simultaneous. In this realm the senses become aware of how subtle they are, and if we succeed can make us feel lucky to be alive.”

And from Pisaro’s personal history of the Wandelweiser collective: “Once one has made the turn onto this strange road, a world of difference opens up. What looks like a narrow passageway from the entrance, turns out to have all kinds of byways, pathways, way stations — it becomes a world of its own. Small musical differences that to some might just seem like inflections (for example, the difference between a silence of 50 and of 60 seconds, or of a few decibels, or the difference in timbre between a low trombone or an e-bow guitar, or between digital silence and recorded silence) become intensely interesting to those working with them. Having had some training in Just Intonation, this was familiar: the difference between an equal tempered and a Just (5/4) major third is for some unimportant, and for others of fundamental importance. If someone says about a kind of music that it “all sounds the same,” it’s very likely to interest me. In my aesthetic experience it’s more enjoyable to make my own landscape out of things that are apparently the same, that to be given a group of diverse things that already stake out their own clear positions on the map.

There’s no reason to love this music. One just does (or one doesn’t). Aesthetics and history come after the fact. Essays (like this one) will not make you like it better and will not ultimately defend its continued existence. The last thing I would want to do is to normalize something I continue to find strange.”

One of the things I’m learning rapidly as I practise field recording is the intrusion of my personal preferences when it comes to framing, editing and processing this material. I can understand exactly why the purists present their findings unedited, without EQ or processing – just the object(s)/environment, the mics and where they chose to place them. I spent forty minutes recording the Dark Arches this morning, at 5am, underneath Leeds train station, before I came to work. Each of the six archways framed the River Aire in a different aspect, despite only being separated from each other by mere metres. The different streams of dripping water in the parking areas all possessed distinct rhythms, pitches and melodies. The sine tone closest to Neville Street formed a smooth, almost solid, consistent bedrock to all the sounds between the road and the river. But between those zones the sounds were less compelling to my ear, the spaces possessed of less character. You wonder, “Who am I to preference one sound over another?” By removing the parts of my walk around the space that I don’t find audibly appealing, I remove context – where the sounds exist in relation to each other. My presence is an intrusion – once recorded, that route is fixed forever, and those temporal moments only exist in that one representational form. How much more do I want to intrude in terms of how I present those sounds? Do I do my best to remove myself from the process? What was I there to record? Am I uncomfortable with some sounds, some silences, because I was more interested in things that sounded more conventionally musical to my ear? You quickly realise how conservative your tastes are. Surely engaging in any artistic, creative process – irrespective of whether you are the audience or creator – is supposed to change us in some way, as opposed to merely being us relentlessly imposing ourselves on everything we encounter. There’s got to be some give and take there, right?

One of the most compelling things about music in Cageian terms (terms that I share) is also one of the most obvious: it only goes away if you ignore it or don’t appreciate it as music. Cage only temporarily branded silence by giving it duration, in order to make a point (a number of points, as it happens). But it’s available any time you care to listen. I grew up with a lot of Creationists, and one of the arguments they often deployed was that there was no way that such a beautiful, awe-inspiring universe could exist without there being a creator of some kind. Even as a teenager, it seemed to be that the appreciation music was a psychophysiological process applied to sound – which logically extends to any other art form. I knew that the Creationist argument hypothesised a creator because the mechanism of appreciation is the same irrespective of whether something is ‘created’ by a person or not. But while the theist anthropocentrism is easy to spot, I’m still steadily getting used to the shadow I cast over what I’m observing.

So yeah. It’d probably be just about accurate to say that these explorations constitute a large bulk of my magical practise at the moment. Hopefully this scratches where you’re itching enough for you to share your own experiences.

I hope I'll have something more thoughtful to say soon, but this was my first exposure to the idea of an anechoic chamber, and I'm fascinated. Would love to experience one someday. If you shout or speak or sing can you hear yourself, other than through your skull bones?

This practice you're engaging in certainly sounds like it's deepening your mindfulness. I imagine a visual artist challenged to pay attention to differences in color or light at the limit of human perception would experience something similar--NPR's Radiolab recently did a very interesting episode on color and color perception differences among animal species, between individual humans, and among human societies over time. I think about how much I tune out just because it's not relevant to the things I'm more interested in attending to, or the things society rewards me for paying attention to--and the same could be said for the subtlest gradations of emotion, stirrings of feeling I don't notice in myself until sometime after it becomes strong enough to direct my behavior, and I wonder why I'm spending all day cooking and then making ice cream until I realize this is my way of experiencing what it feels like to settle into a new place to live, at this moment. Frexample.

entity said: this was my first exposure to the idea of an anechoic chamber, and I'm fascinated. Would love to experience one someday. If you shout or speak or sing can you hear yourself, other than through your skull bones?

You'd be able to hear yourself, just not any reflection from the walls. So you'd be able to hear yourself, but I imagine you'd sound very different to how you were used to hearing yourself.

Here's a recent Guardian column on a visit to one in Minnesota:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/may/18/experience-quietest-place-on-earth

From the article: The presence of sound means things are working; it's business as usual – when sound is absent, that signals malfunction. Lovely turn of phrase, and another reason why using it in music induces interesting reactions in both musicians and audiences.

Most music today is pathologically 'full', right? No gaps, no pauses, no space - in fact, a lot of artificial space from reverb and echo. And compression - everything has to be bought up to such a ridiculous volume, uniform across the whole track. If manfunction is one meaning of silence then that might explain things; one possible reading is that it induces anxiety in a lot of musicians and listeners. It seems, from that article, that the anechoic chamber induces anxiety, more often than not.

entity said: NPR's Radiolab recently did a very interesting episode on color and color perception differences among animal species, between individual humans, and among human societies over time

John Cage and Morton Feldman hung out with a lot of New York's most celebrated and influential expressionist painters. They were very influenced by painters who use fine gradations of colour, gradations that could only be perceived from certain angles, at certain distances, and in certain light conditions. Feldman, in some respects, could be seen as a sonified painter - he constantly talks about his composition process in terms of painting technique, and he wrote compositions for the Rothko Chapel and his bezzie mate Philip Guston (before they fell out). The reason that the music isn't as successful as the painting is its duration, IMO. You can look at a Rothko for thirty seconds and say you've seen it; not so with a Feldman composition, which at up to six hours (typical length: eighty minutes) can be demanding. Rewarding - he's one of my favourites - but demanding.

Fantastic writing, Seth. Must get back to this soon, but so little time at the moment. :(

Loose ideas (mostly so I can remind myself for future ravings/rants and maybe spur some thoughts in others):

• "Silent music" forces the equipment, the process and the non-human closer to the fore
  
• In this age of hyper-compression and all loud all the time, silence is more silent than ever
• Silence is both habituation and the opposite of habituation
• Silence is golden
• Silence is acquiesence
• Stilling the inner voice - is that Troo Silenz (TM) or just a prelude to the full trumpet blasts of the G#dH*#d?
• Hmmm.
  

Seth said: All the sounds are good in their own right, but I’d love to get at those tiny sounds, the minutes drones, buzzes, oscillations, whooshes, whirrs, whistles, sine tones, shimmering together in a technological haze behind everything

Room tone used to be my favorite part of recording on a set. After each scene, you'd have to spend 30 seconds with everyone standing there, breathing, totally silent.

The tone would be used in post-production in case you had to have an actor repeat a line, or you had to smidge around dialogue or the sound of something closing or whatever.

It was always a reflective moment, but an especially mindful one - the guy with the boom is focusing on the ambient hum of fluorescent lights or computer fans or traffic a half-mile outside the building.

David Lynch does a great job making viewers aware of room tone. Rushing, humming sounds. (The only thing similar I can think of is the into-the-drain shot in the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink.)

Room tone.... nice term.

Grant, would the sound engineers fix the standing waves in a room too - as in figure out the resonant frequencies?

I think studio engineers would do that, sure - I'm pretty sure I've read about that in TapeOp (when they interview people like Alan Parsons or whoever). I know pros will put in baffles and whatnot to mess with hums and resonance.

But what I was recalling was a lot more ad hoc and ear-oriented, from film school. It's a bit like shooting with available light, instead of using lamps to light a scene, I guess. (I never wound up using room tone in post myself... and I kind of think I *should* have, if only to see how that part of posting worked. It was drummed into us to always *get* room tone, though, at the end of each scene.)

If you ever saw Living in Oblivion, the last bit of the movie is the getting-room-tone moment.

This belongs here http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/may/18/experience-quietest-place-on-earth