Going about without making any noise is perhaps the most difficult task of our day. If we try to make sense of the noise, we discover music.
I was thinking the blog was a silent activity, but then I began hearing my fingers striking the keyboard, padded notes, which, if given time, could be organized into a piece of music.
The quieter we try to be, the more noise we hear.
We might think of silent noise, tinnitus, for example, an apparent oxymoron, a noise but silent because it’s not really a sound, but simply the perception of sound, hearing a sound that has no outside source. Others can’t hear it, no matter how hard they listen. But they have their own silent noise playlists.
The keyboard went quiet as I reread the above paragraphs. I’m in real time for the moment, but my reader, if there is one, will not be in the same time. Thus the blog is like a recording, but the reader will not be able to hear the keyboard as I type, or as I typed, unless I made a recording.
There are 24 time zones around the globe. They allow for music to occur internationally. But not everyone pays strict attention to the time zones. In China, for example, everyone uses the same time, all the time, regardless of which of the five geographically separated time zones they might be in. What time is it becomes an interesting question, since sunrises and sunsets can occur hours apart, depending on where you are at the time. In other words, to awake at sunrise for one person, could be sleeping in for another, not getting up until noon! For some reason, we try to match our time with the position of the sun. But most people work inside, unlike our ancestors, so what does the sun have to do with it? Circadian rhythms. We can’t hide from the sun.
I’m making a recording now of the keyboard, using my cell phone. Note the pauses, as I try to figure out what to say. The spaces between the notes create music, because they are separated in time (duration). But is there rhythm? The recording has now gone on for just over one minute.
A default has given the keyboard recording the title “Voice 0061.” I’ve tried to upload the recording to this blog post, so readers can follow along, hearing the typing as they are reading the paragraph, but I received a message saying I’m unable to upload the file, to wit: “Sorry, you are not allowed to upload this file type.” Thus we discover that learning to play an instrument is harder than we might think. Undaunted, I’ll now try a video, using the keyboard and my cell phone.
I’ve set the phone against the screen, and I can’t see what I’m typing now, feeling much like the player in a jazz band. But I type on, being video-recorded. I don’t feel much like continuing the experiment, but having pushed on this far, I keep typing. As Cage said, “What we re-quire is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking.”1 Similarly, what music requires is that I go on typing. Many mistakes in this typed paragraph, like playing the worong [sic] notes on the guitar or piano, but I’ve gone back and corrected the text, but the mistakes, as recorded, sound just like all the other notes, no problem.
Now I have the video recording on my phone. Because I set the phone so close to my screen, the video is a white grey cloud, but the viewer can hear the keyboard. Now I have to figure out how to get the video from my phone into this blog post, so readers can listen to it as they read along. Alas, I try to email it to myself, but get a Gmail message saying it’s too big a file. Yet it’s only 1:33 minutes.
But you can perform your own keyboard music. All you have to do is type and listen. You don’t even have to type real words, but that should probably be the subject of a different blog post.
- John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing” (1959), from “Silence” (First printing 1961. Wesleyan Paperback, 1973). ↩︎
The Coming of the Toads 