ABSTRACT
John Cage made this observation after visiting an anechoic chamber at Harvard University: “Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot” (Cage, 1961: 8). Inside, where he would find silence if ever he could anywhere, he heard his nervous system and the circulation of his blood for the first time. The experience of sensory deprivation is so disturbingly loud inside that the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States uses it as a method of torture (Benjamin, n.d.). Sound, it seems, is an unavoidable part of life. Cage’s experience in the anechoic chamber was one of the inspirations for his famous composition 4’33’’. In it, Cage sets the listener the task of hearing the music in the constructed silence, which turns out to be the noise of coughs and the rustling of programs. Silence, it seems, is what we make of it. Coming at the subject digitally, Raven Chacon, a composer and member of the artist collective Postcommodity, recorded silence at some of the quietest places in North America (Window Rock, Arizona, the Sandia Mountains, New Mexico, and Canyon de Chelly, Arizona). When edited to maximum volume, each has its own noise signature that can be clearly heard as different from the others (Chacon, 1999). Beneath silence, it seems, lies noise in its infinite variety.
