The Sounds of Silence. Some reflections on possible silences

Abstract

Although the use of silence is of importance when defining the grammatical properties of musical discourse, a more accurate study results from the observation of silence beyond this context, that is, of silence as a limit. This paper seeks to reflect on the ideas of silence as a utopia and auditory threshold as a generator of a type of perception of microscopic characteristics. To deepen this direction, we will review a set of concepts that will allow us to make a synthetic vision of the potential existing in the ideas outlined above. Specifically, we will refer to the statements of Jankélévitch (2003 [1961]) about the "differential properties" of a silence understood as attenuation, and of absolute silence as an "inconceivable limit"; to Cage (2002 [1961]; Pritchett 1996) regarding silence as the enabler of an emergent listening of ambient sound, of discrete characteristics; to Toop (2016 [2010]), in particular when it refers to the problem of mediation/acute perception that silent media make possible; and to LaBelle (2012 [2008]), regarding the inevitability of a relational ecology of hearing; these, among other approaches. The document, although not conclusive, proposes that the field that encourages electroacoustic music can open up vast possibilities for the performance of an audition of discrete (barely audible) characteristics. Thus allowing, through the use of the loudspeaker as a technological prosthesis, what we well might call a type of "hearing at the threshold of hearing," or more precisely, a "microscopic hearing."