A quick piece made in fl studio, with the help of my good friend Filton (@josephmjk), as an academic response to research conducted around the American avant-garde's ideas of noise and silence.

A small section of my accompanying essay explains: 

Of course, Cage’s articulation of silence took a number of different forms. Susan Sontag helps shed some light on those that address my piece’s interest in figurative Cagean ‘silence’, as opposed to its more literal materialisation in 4’3”. She places the figurative potential of silence in the hands of the listener: ‘there remains the inescapable truth about perception: the positivity of all experience at every moment of it […] “silence” never ceases to imply its opposite and to depend on its presence: just as there can’t be “up” without “down”’.  This divine omnipotence of perception only occurs during silent moments. Silence, then, draws our attention towards the audibility of our usually inaudible acoustic environment: the totality of acoustic resources making up an area. When carrying out field recordings for my piece, I experienced an exciting altering of auditory perception. Through paying extreme attention to my acoustic environment, I became self-conscious of my individual field of silence, enabling me to distinguish between the separate components of my acoustic environment and how they interact with each other. 

My piece, then, specifically draws upon Cage’s admiration of unheard natural sounds. He sketches this out through pioneering ideas of experimental process and structure in the theoretical work, ‘Music Lovers’ Field Companion’. Here, Cage uses his interest in mushrooms as rhetoric to flaunt the emptiness of art music, to propose an alternative practice of silent music making. He humorously questions, ‘whether the gills of certain mushrooms are employed by appropriately small-winged insects for the production of pizzicati […] could not, through technological means, be brought, amplified and magnified, into our theatres’.  In my piece, the field recordings draw upon Cage’s interest in the minutiae and idiosyncrasy of natural sound that he reinterprets as music. My field recordings attempt to capture not only the soundscape, but the entire acoustic atmosphere of my surroundings. As my piece comes to a close, the final field recording’s sudden introduction of the sonorous drill noise foregrounds the invasiveness of human-caused sound. The other two euphonic field recordings capture more harmonic interactions between natural and human-caused noise, with the sound of a children’s playground over the plane’s droning hum in the first, and the family talking over the natural sound of ducks and water in the second. 

The combination of natural and human-caused sound in these three field-recordings, then, investigates the eco acoustics of Sheffield as post-industrial space: a never-ending battle between euphony and dissonance, where natural sounds are resurfacing, yet the mechanical voice from the past still lingers. This curious mix between the natural and industrial world is intrinsic to the Bole Hills area where my field recordings were taken, a former place of lead smelting turned vast recreation ground for the community. The accompanying photo on the SoundCloud upload of my piece captures this mood of contrast. The photo was shot on location of the field recordings, featuring a  stock Sheffield landscape where the remanence of industrial greys and natural greens coexist, strangely beautiful in their post-industrial acceptance of one another.

Bibliography:

Cage, John, ‘Music Lovers’ Field Companion’, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), pp. 274-276

Sontag, Susan, ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’, Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), pp. 3-14

Marek Nowicki