Silence

Transcript

Music is often thought of as the sounds that come between two silences, yet not only are the silence before and the silence after a performance often communicatively significant, but also the innumerable silences interspersed along the way. In surveying the terminology that musicians use to talk about silence, Ian Bent identifies a tendency to think about it as passive: the word rest, for example, grounds the silence in the laying aside of an instrument, rather than in the active cultivation of a period of soundlessness. Yet, more recent studies have pointed to the expressive work that these gaps achieve, and to the aesthetic investment that listeners make in them.

The most explored function of silence is to parse communicative streams into groups. Within speech, pauses are most frequently found at boundary points, and are informative to infants learning to segment the speech stream. Similarly, in music, pauses contribute to the determination of which events in a melody combine together to form a group. Listeners are sensitive to their normative and nonnormative positions, systematically rating silences as tenser and longer when they occurred before tonal closure (i.e., when they occurred midphrase).

What is happening during boundary silences? Using electroencephalogram (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG), Thomas Knösche and colleagues identified mechanisms underlying a shift in attention from the previous phrase to the forthcoming one, suggesting that listeners use pauses to reallocate attentional focus.

But pauses can also assume other, more expressive functions. Many people have remarked how fraught certain silences can seem in performance, for example, the silence just before a virtuoso violinist lifts her bow. And in 4′33″, John Cage explored the perceptual implications of aesthetically framed silence. It has been proposed that silence can draw a listener's attention away from the music and toward his or her perceptions of it—exposing, for example, an expectation that a listener was already having, but was unaware that she was having until the silence underscored it. By mimicking the kind of prosody characteristic of conversation between people close to one another, silence can also generate an impression of musical intimacy. When it follows a climactically intensifying passage, such as a dramatic crescendo, a silence can imply that the boundaries of what is expressible in music have been reached, that the emotional content has become so great that the only possible response is silence.

The Cage example underscores the challenges inherent in defining musical silence. It can be useful to think about two distinct senses of silence: acoustic silence, a phenomenon residing in the acoustic signal; and perceived silence, the perceptions that people bring to the period of silence. It is possible to embed the same acoustic silence [Page 1003]within two different musical contexts, and produce very different perceived silences. Moreover, in the case of some acoustic silences that arise as an artifact of articulation (e.g., the brief silence after a staccato note), there may be no perceived silence at all.

It can also be useful to think about aesthetically framed silence (the silence of the actual instruments participating in the piece) versus literal silence (noiselessness coming from other sources in the space—a quieting of audience rustles, performer breathing, or air conditioner humming). The Cage example takes what seems to be aesthetically framed silence (the pianist refraining from making sounds on the piano) and highlights a lack of literal silence (all the noises in the concert hall), and in doing so expands the aesthetic framing to include noise from sources other than the piano.

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