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The notable absence is the playing of the piano, and this absence not only points to itself, but other presences that may otherwise have gone unremarked.

By way of multimodal transposition, the sound of 4ʹ33″ can be represented visually as a conventional musical score in which silence is represented as “rests.” John Cage created a version of the score using his “proportional notation,” now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This is a nicely hand-titled and signed sequence of pages, blank but for a vertical line of time marked with the duration of each movement.

There is no absence of sound that is total – unless you are deaf. The non-playing in a context where playing would normally be expected is a meaningful absence.

“The Earth’s Quietest Place Will Drive You Crazy in 45 Minutes,” says a headline in the Smithsonian Magazine. An anechoic chamber created in the Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota is so quiet that you don’t hear anything. The threshold of hearability for an average human is 0 decibels. The Orfield Lab registers –9.4 dBA. Total silence is impossible, so places quieter than this lab are theoretically possible, though to be quieter still is practically irrelevant in terms of human physiology. After your ears adjust in the Orfield Lab, you begin to hear your own heartbeat. “In the anechoic chamber, you become the sound.”⁵⁴

There is no absence – silence, for instance – until it is noticeable. When we want it to be, we have many ways to direct notice to silence – ellipses in transcriptions of speech, a person noticeably missing from a dialogue, rests in musical scores, a finger pressed over lips, or digitized measurements of decibels below the threshold zero.

Reading mostly happens in silence, and conversation is the sound of speech punctuated by meaningful silence (meaning, “I can speak now”) – marking yet another of the dramatic differences between these two forms of meaning.

Other silences in speech, when noticed, might also be symptomatic of absences. Bessie Dendrinos and Emilia Robeiro Pedro studied gender difference in giving directions in Greece and Portugal. When a man and woman together are approached by a stranger to give directions, the man mostly speaks while the woman remains silent, a dynamic of presence and absence that points to the wider context of gender inequalities.⁵⁵ The absence is noticeable if not always noticed, so, marking another presence.

In his “Lecture on Nothing,” John Cage says, “I am here, and there is nothing to say … What we require is a silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking.”⁵⁶

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⁵³ John Biguenet, 2015, Silence, London, UK: Bloomsbury, pp. 49–51.

⁵⁴ Rose Eveleth, 2013, “Earth’s Quietest Place Will Drive You Crazy in 45 Minutes,” Smithsonian Magazine (December 17).

⁵⁵ Bessie Dendrinos and Emilia Robeiro Pedro, 1997, “Giving Street Directions: The Silent Role of Women,” pp. 215–38 in Silence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by A. Jaworksi, Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter.

⁵⁶ John Cage, 1961 [1966], Silence: Lectures and Writings, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 109.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 100-101. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

John Cage’s 4ʹ33″ §MS1.1.2a