Creativity within Silence – Cameron Wehr PHOTOGRAPH: The City’s Life – Am Silruk

Creativity within Silence

CAMERON WEHR

Without producing a sound, John Cage revolutionized music. The 1952 debut of his three-movement composition 4’33” in which the only note instructed the player to be quiet brought about a swarm of criticism; some believed that his piece mocked interpretations of modern art from a new perspective. The silence within Cage’s 4’33” served as a catalyst for differentiating while new school of thought in which composers and music analysts began to view sound and composition questioned its status as music. However, Cage’s radical piece mainstreamed conception and the perception of music which encouraged the biological, philosophical, and psychological examination of music and sound within our selective attention.

In this research paper, I intend to establish silence as an inherent social construct to musical perception in order to argue that creativity necessitates silence. I will first show the historical use of silence within compositions in order to demonstrate its value of contrast in producing vivid emotion. I will then discuss the differentiation of music’s conception and perception, through both music philosophy and semiotic theory. This conversation will transition to a biological standpoint in order to highlight the sounds that humans naturally deem insignificant and thus diminish in their auditory perception. From this, I contest that creativity is borne out of silence through the widening of sound production outside of conventional musical thought increasing the unpredictability of communication. Analysis of the social construction of conventional, or socially significant, sound and its corresponding relative silence will emphasize that the conscious attention to ambient noise will increase our awareness and, subsequently, our ability to engage with new creative processes.

Since its inception, silence has pervaded music. William Beeman notes that there are tertiary, secondary, and principal sources of silence that separate notes, movements, and the beginning and end of the performance, respectively; therefore, silence is “a problem of cognitive framing” (24).

Composers have utilized this separation of notated sounds throughout history: from Handel’s Messiah to George Gershwin’s An American in Paris and Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana to Ludwig von Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. Their significance has varied, but the overall intent to create a sense of wonder, apprehension, or excitement has allowed composers to strategically implement silence as a means to emphasize the “actual,” conventional music. Rather than highlighting the value of the notes’ musical conception as the driver of emotion and excitement, it is the silence that gives a background for which sound can become dramatic, mellow, or joyful. By this logic, silence serves only as a social construct through which people can gauge significant noises, which are otherwise unworthy of our immediate attention; it is this contrast that allows certain sounds to be conceived as music.

Cage’s 4’33”, therefore, upends conventional music because it brings the background noises of ambient sound to our forefront attention. There is no longer a social construction by which we can gauge music from ambience, melody from white noise. In justifying his composition, Cage states that, “There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound” (191). If we assume that silence serves only as the contrast to sounds, we realize that silence can only be relative; the complete absence of sound, as silence commonly connotes, cannot exist without a noise to differentiate that sense of absolute silence. Rather 4’33” as music brings our attention to ambient noise because it questions our fundamental assumptions of music. At a lecture given at the Black Mountain College Satie Festival, Cage stated that:

If you consider that sound is characterized by its pitch, its loudness, its timbre, and its duration, and that silence, which is the opposite and, therefore, the necessary partner of sound, is characterized only by its duration, you will be drawn to the conclusion that of the four characteristics of the material of music, duration, that is, time length, is the most fundamental. Silence cannot be heard in terms of pitch or harmony: It is heard in terms of time length. (Kostelanetz 81)

Sound, no matter its secondary attributes of pitch, volume, or timbre, requires the relative silence before and after it in order to be recognized.

Its characteristic duration motivates the composer’s emotions; its absence creates a sense of white noise that we naturally filter out. By bringing this ambient sound to our immediate attention, we perceive that music, and sound in general, requires a corresponding silence more than just a motivating factor but as an intrinsic component to its auditory perception.

When addressed so overtly, sound duration forces us to differentiate musical perception from musical conception. Christopher Shultis asserts that, while we can be unfamiliar with a composition’s musical harmonization and structure or its historical significance, we cannot abstain from its perception; there is “neither thought nor preconception” when we listen to music (343). Auditory art, such as music, requires nothing but the passive participation of the listener in order to be perceived; however, it is within the listener’s active participation that they can fully appreciate its significance and conceive an attachment to the piece’s sounds. A music composition’s meaning and value derives itself within the instantaneous moment. There is no permanence in sound. As philosopher Salomé Voegelin states, its interpretation relies upon the listener to “invent it in listening to the sensory material rather than to recognize its contemporary and historical context” (7). The conception of music, in this case its interpretation, relies firstly on the perception of sound and secondly on the process and categorization of such sound. Such categorization inherently relies on the conception of emotions that are dependent upon the upbringing and culture of the listener. The acculturation of such sounds produces different interpretations that range solely based around the composition’s historical conception. When researching American and Chinese listening cognitive habits, researchers Xiao Hu and Jin Ha Lee found that Americans were more partial to music with lyrics while Chinese listeners preferred instrumental music (536). The conception of vocal and nonvocal music relies upon the cultural preferences and the constant presence of certain music conditions the brain to be more partial to such sounds. The sounds, over time, gain an emotional attachment of familiarity. In short, while the perception of music represents the objective manifestation of sound, its conception concerns itself with the subjective secondary historical and acculturation context.

Because silence consists only of duration, silence as a performative art streamlines active engagement with the listener’s sense of self and their surroundings. When discussing music, philosopher Theodor Adorno realizes that the composition’s “cognitive character becomes radical in that moment in which art is no longer content with the role of perception” (112). When we focalize silence, we no longer passively listen rather we must become aware of our own present selves within the environment. Music no longer serves as a device to forget ourselves, but it acts as a way for us to think more critically about our self-consciousness. In analyzing silence, we must realize the sense of time and place that is inherent to the everyday actions of those around us. However, when we contemplate our surroundings, we interpret these external sounds through the internalized meanings to which we are accustomed. Within the field of semiotics, Rosario Mirigliano reasons that within a sound’s “nature as sign, it is already endowed with meaning” (50). Within the instantaneous moment of hearing, we process the sound to signify some emotion from its secondary attributes. Out of survival, we condition our hearing to distinguish sounds like ocean waves from car sirens based around their immediacy. Although we can alter our understanding of the sounds around us, we cannot separate our conception of such sounds from its perception. We must examine our own presence within our environment in order to reevaluate our reactions to those noises around us.

The value we attribute to sound determines its immediacy. When silence is contrasted with a random noise, a fixed pitch, a diatonic melody, or a random melody, the reaction of the auditory complex within the brain is extremely similar, indicating that the initial response to stimuli is the same (Patterson et al. 768). The auditory complex solely registers that there is noise; any subsequent judgement or conception forms an instantaneous secondary process to establish the emotion or signified intent of the sound. Because the culture in which people associate defines the standards of music, the conception of music is therefore learned. In this way, sound becomes accultured because of the actions that surround certain sequences of pitches. Take, for instance, La Marseillaise, the French national anthem: though our auditory complex processes each sound similarly, the conception of a single march-like melody slowly becoming harmonized fosters a sense of

patriotism as many different individuals coalesce to become one. Once we realize that the association of sound with vivid emotions like patriotism constitutes what we deem valuable, we become more conscious of our perception of sound, or rather what sounds we naturally diminish because of their perceived insignificance. However, the differentiation between the perception and the conception of sound is somewhat blurry because the brain conditions itself to react to certain noises in specific ways. When studying the superior temporal sulcus portion of the brain using functional magnetic resonance, researchers found that the region responded significantly when listening to individual vocal sounds as compared to control stimuli like scrambled voices and amplitudemodulated noise (Belin et al. 311). From an evolutionary standpoint, this auditory selective attention only seems consequential since the human voice is the primary way that humans can differentiate from other animals. The brain conditions itself to seek out human voices in order to connect with others. Though the perception of sound presents as the same, as with the previous study, the conception of significant sound within the brain allows us to accentuate such timbres and sounds. This is obvious when we also consider that musicians with increased exposure and experience to refining their sense of hearing allow for more accentuated recognition of non-vocal sounds, which may be attributed to the structural adaptation in cerebral gray matter in use-dependent activities like music-learning (Gaser and Gottfried 9244). Such neural plasticity during childhood conditions our brains to heighten our sense of hearing towards specific sounds that are biologically important. This development complicates the differentiation between our perception and conception of sound; while they are inherently different, they are intrinsically connected. By understanding that our conception of sound, through our learned experiences during maturation, alters how and what we hear, we can examine how our cultures have valued certain sounds and pitches and analyze their effects on our perception of culture and international situations.

Silence as a performative art allows us to analyze this conception of sound without our biologically-altered cognitive frames of auditory recognition.

Much along the lines of Adorno’s assertion of active engagement, Cage’s own philosophy when composing 4’33” was to “remove purpose” because “by eliminating purpose, what I call awareness increases” (Kostelanetz 81). When we remove our ability to passively conceive music as we have acculturated our hearing, we suddenly must focalize something other than what we regard as customary; we must recondition our perception of sound. If we remove the stimuli that naturally attract our hearing, we broaden our selective attention to encompass sounds that would otherwise be diminished within the superior temporal sulcus portion of the brain. Cage’s intent of “removing purpose,” therefore, is paradoxical: in highlighting the absence of conventional music, Cage forces the listener to reevaluate the fundamental cognitive frame of hearing. Even in silence there is a societal purpose. By choosing certain sounds or relative silence, composers either perpetuate or critique the standards of music and sound in place; the process of creation is a constant state of choosing what to highlight and what to exclude from conception. Therefore, performing silence questions conventional norms of cognition and our societal conditioning in order to acknowledge evolutionary tendencies in basic sensory experiences.

Human development relies upon social, intellectual, and physical experimentation and exploration; by shifting our perceptions of sound and music, we can interact with new creative processes. In trying to create silence through digital media, software engineers have come up with new techniques to analyze data composition in order to produce new sounds beyond the original intent of the computer software (Cascone 14). By examining this “emptiness” and channeling it for data sequencing, technicians have created artificial sounds that fall outside of natural timbre and pitch, pushing the boundaries of conventional music to include artificial timbres and pitches like square-wave frequencies and semitones. The acknowledgement of what sounds people choose to notice allows for new avenues of data collection. In this way, the instruments that create the music are musical because of their dual role as processor and producer. Christopher Shultis describes this idea when he states that creativity “is a process of diminishing the role of the self in the creative act” (316). When someone abstracts themselves from their work, they abandon any sense of ideology,

of ingrained biases, of cultural affiliation. Within the modern era, creativity relies upon the sole act of the creation itself and not the culture upon which it relies in order to derive meaning. When art is able to stand alone as the sole form of its own engagement, it requires no preconceived notion of beauty or ingrained values of power and grandeur; the sound demands attention in and of itself rather than the idea it emulates.

In order to remove purpose, creators must replace intention. John Cage, alongside Christian Wolff and Steve Reich, most famously attempted this through different methods: from the square root method, where the music would fit a square rhythmic and melodic pattern, to the acknowledgement of time before rhythm, where there were differing sets of notes to be completed within a uniform time period. However, as Shultis notes, “to remove intention requires the omission of even the ideogrammic nature of language. It requires a complete removal of all symbolic reference” (343). If we consider, then, that music, as a form of communication, intrinsically holds emotional value, we cannot escape its cultural significance; however, with the abstraction of melodies with which cultures associate and the invention of new artificial sounds, composers now have a new scope of creative endeavor. This release from the confines of musical and cultural ideologies derives, in part, from the abstention of predictability. Much like in music, in languages such as English, “half of what we write is determined by the structure of the language and half is chosen freely” (Weaver 56). The adherence to a specific set of notation and specific sounds allows music to become acculturated because of its predictability; without the expansion of such symbols and pitches, creativity runs dry. Unintentionality, or the absence of intention, signifies the ultimate removal of purpose because it abstains from predictability. Unintentional music serves no societal purpose other than the mere satisfaction of sound and the sense of hearing.

Silence as music, therefore, has purpose, but its purpose is to remove the conventional notions of music. By performing silence, the composer suspends conventional music’s intention as perceived and shifts the attention to the audience. Music creation serves as a device to reinforce or critique the noise society deems insignificant and, in this, substantiates or

degrades the cultural ideologies that become associated with sound. In order to combat this acculturation, composers must abstract sound in order for the listener to value it for its inherent qualities. Silence, being completely intentional in allowing space for unintentionality, increases unpredictability and thus the opportunity for creative endeavors.

Silence as a performative art is necessary for the future of musical creation and production. Throughout the history of music, composers have utilized silence in order to contrast the significance of different aspects and subjects within the composition, building a sense of suspense, excitement, or mellowness. The abandonment of conventional music within John Cage’s 4’33” deconstructs this emotional production when the composition brings attention to the sounds that humans biologically filter out within their everyday lives. The differentiation of perception and conception of music allows analysts to realize that the emotional value we attribute to music is not inherent but acculturated based on societal standards of music. However, our conception of music may alter our perception of music; therefore, we must be cognizant of the influence of our conception of sound in order to interpret our perception of sound. By increasing our awareness of the sounds around us, we interpret the sounds that are produced throughout our everyday lives without the reliance upon cultural ideology in order to derive meaning. Silence as a performative art abstracts sounds in order to establish sound as the sole creator and producer of significance. Once we acknowledge silence as music, we can endeavor within new fields of creative processes to reinforce or challenge social norms of sound.

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Abu Dhabi is the city of diversity. Not only is it a place for people who come from different backgrounds, but it also contains many ranges of non-human resources. The contrast between industrialization and nature is somewhat combined perfectly with each other. In this photo, I want to show the beauty of the two components, materialism and human lives, although they are different from each other, the combination of the two depicts beautiful scenarios and brings lives to the place.

“The City’s Life” by Am Silruk