45g of Silence by Mads Hagstrøm

45g (1.5oz) of pure silence sealed in a can for just $19.14 at FLOWmarket. (The 'Next Generation Luxury' company also sells cans of self-esteem, compassion, intimacy and 'God'.) Design by Mads Hagstrøm.

There's an obvious nod here to Marcel Duchamp's Air de Paris ('50 cc of Paris Air') from 1919: something that I referenced in the Sshhh chapter of the upcoming Reverberations book.

Hoon Kim - 30 Beautiful Everyday Sounds

Hoon Kim
30 Beautiful Everyday Sounds
New York, NY: H. Kim. 2009

Synopsis: This collection of bold, black and white pixelated patterns was created using a system that translates sound into pattern, relying on pitch and volume to determine the size and shape of the pixels. Graphic designer Hoon Kim interprets 30 sounds, ranging from a baby’s sneeze and a ticking alarm clock to the sound of bread being sliced, or of silence.

Category: Book
Pages: 64 p.
Dimensions (Height x Width x Depth): 20.5 x 20.5 cm.
Cover: Paperback
Binding: staple bound
Process: offset-printed
Color: black-and-white

John Cage

Cage (and particularly his 4'33") was hugely influential with the theory behind the Sshhh project. In what was a (failed) campaign for an alternative Christmas number one single, it's now at 21 in the Top 40. I hope that a few more people investigate some of the ideas behind the piece rather than just see it as a subversive attempt to topple X Factor.

The remixes, by the way, are entertaining. I particularly like Herve's 'Tidies Up The Studio remix' where the silence is punctuated by the odd bit of background noise.

Available to download here: Cage Against The Machine

Downloading British Library audio

Following a trip to Ratchford to pick up some book making equipment, I've downloaded the audio recorded at the British Library. Next I'm going to import the wav files into Acid and edit them down so that they become the final tracks. I've also decided that the tracks won't have titles but be identified by their running time. This is a reference to John Cage's silent composition known as 4'33" - although my recordings are far from silent. Some are pretty chaotic actually.

Silence in the words of...

A lift from the blog of Berlin sound artist Andreas Bick (http://silentlistening.wordpress.com/) which collects a number of quotes based around the concept of "silence".

Silence a boundary notion, a conceptual ideal, an aural vanishing point. Saying something about silence equals losing it. Being silent is impossible may it include to cease living. Many words have been uttered to grasp this paradox.

There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.

No Silence exists, that is not pregnant with sound.

Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. - John Cage

Silence is a word which is not a word, and breathes an object which is not an object. - Georges Bataille

We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven. - Maurice Merleau-Ponty

There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. This speech is speaking of a language locked beneath it. That is the continual reference. The speech we hear is an indication of that we don’t hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a sly, anguished or mocking smokescreen which keeps the other in its place. - Harold Pinter

Noise may have lost its power to offend. Silence hasn’t. - Dan Warburton

The fear of silence is nothing new. Silence surrounds the dark world of death. Sometimes the silence of the vast universe hovers over us, enveloping us. There ist he intense silence of birth, the quiet silence of one’s return to the earth. Hasn’t art been the human creature’s rebellion against silence? Poetry and music were born when man first uttered sound, resisting the silence. - Toru Takemitsu

When silence is conceived as the rejection of the human personality, the ulitmate silence is death. Then man likes to surround himself with sounds in order to nourish his fantasy of perpetual life. In Western society silence is negative, an embarrassment, a vacuum. Silence for Western man equals communication hangup. If one does not speak, the other will speak. - R. Murray Schafer

The essence of sound is felt in both motion and silence, it passes from existent to nonexistent. When there is no sound, it is said that there is no hearing, but that does not mean that hearing has lost its preparedness. Indeed, when there is no sound, hearing is most alert, and when there is sound the hearing nature is least developed. - Kirpal Singh

But if it’s true that all symphonies end in silence, it’s equally true that they begin there as well. Silence, after all, both buries and births us, and just as life without the counterweight of mortality would mean nothing, so silence alone, by offering itself as the eternal Other, makes our music possible. - Marc Slouka

Any given silence takes its identity as a stretch of time being perforated by sound. A genuine emptiness, a pure silence, are not feasible — either conceptually or in fact. If only because the art-work exists in a world furnished with many other things, the artist who creates silence or emptiness must produce something dialectical: a full void, an enriching emptiness, a resonating or eloquent silence. Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech (in many instances, of complaint or indictment) and an element in a dialogue. - Susan Sontag

There is a beautiful page with lots of writings about silence. And please check the essay „The Aesthetics of Silence“ of Susan Sontag.

Onomatopoeia #1

With this project I'm looking at the description of sound and onomatopoeias are interesting in this respect. Actually having words which imitate the sound they describe may be particularly useful in terms of text. But even the title here - Sshhh! - has some relevance given its similarity to the Japanese word 'shiiin' that is used to define absolute silence. [I need to look into Japanese sound symbolism at some point, by the way.]

Obviously, they can differ when compared to those used within other languages. The English clock's "tick-tock", for example, is described as"tic-tac" by our French pals. Then there's this: