Silence is Golden

4 minutes and 33 seconds is all it took for me to realize that my life is never silent. John Cage’s groundbreaking masterpiece opens my ears to the constant noise that exists around me. In class I noticed the sounds of my peers and their attempts to be as silent as possible, while at home I could hear the TV playing in the living room and my sister talking to her friends on skype about the latest ‘the 100’ episode. It was safe to say that I couldn’t truly experience the magical silence that we all think Cage was trying to achieve, but I don’t believe that could have been his intention at all. Thinking of the context presented his song, the audience couldn’t have known they would be in for a whole 4 and a half minutes of supposed silence. They would have sat there in anticipation for Cage to begin his newest piece and then became uncomfortable and anxious going through all the reasons as to why he wasn’t playing anything. I think they would have been thinking: “Why hasn’t he started yet?” “Is it very soft?” “Are we to sit in silence the entire time?” “Was being silent the song?” and my favourite scenario was “This is bloody rubbish”, but I wasn’t shown Cage’s 4’33” to hypothesize what audiences would be internalizing. What I got from listening to 4’33” was that no sound is still sound, and that almost everything in my life could be recorded to become a piece of my self-portrait. My audio clip didn’t need to be speech, or even audible, it just had to be… there. All I needed was reasoning behind it and it would quantify as a part of me. That’s why I think one of my audio pieces will have no spoken word and challenge myself to find something insignificant that I hear everyday.