Pianola roll, 24 minutes of silence recorded in the Plimsoll gallery

Exhibition: Ghost Hunters, 2013, Plimsoll Gallery, Hobart

[# title - silence song]

There is a privilege to sitting in a space, with headphones on, and listening to silence.

Maybe a privilege of time, to be asked to afford the time, to actually do it, to stop and listen. I never really do that.

Always busy - always listening to my own thoughts or talking or music or the TV or Radio National or all the things I listen to. Never silence, never concerted or considered silence.

And headphones too - they pick stuff up that that my ears don’t. They amplify the silence.

[# title - thoughts on silence in a silent space]

[t# title - I don’t really know about silence (yet)]

[# title - silence in stereo]

[# title - I am trying to describe it]

Technology makes this something else. The recorder makes this ever present hiss that is not actually present until you play back. Audacity’s normalise takes out the hiss but brings a whisper, strange whisper. Illegible, only just audible, but whisper none the less.

[# title: mono-silence]

And I can see the wave form, in silence.

I can capture it.

I like the way Cage talks about silence as (a kind of) sound: not other than, separate from or opposite to noise. I like this ‘absence of any intention’ which distinguishes silence (ambient sounds) from musical sounds.

I also like the way he sees writing music itself as ‘a form of paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play’, and yet ‘an affirmation of life’.

[# title - sound becomes object]

[# title - silence song]

This work is not about a refusal to ‘hear’ silence as anything other than musical, I just prefer the ambient sounds as music.

You know this does make music.