ABSTRACT
Just before 5 p.m. on 31 May 2011, the pips—six short tones used to signal the precise start of each hour—went missing from BBC Radio 4. In the blankness of that silence, devoid of the echoless voice of time, we saw the soul of the machine. In the moment of that abyss—an aural absence described by the Daily Telegraph as a ‘deafening silence’—the eternity of the significance of the pips momentarily surfaced, crystallised, and threatened to crumble.
