Share Your Silence
Published:
A sound map made in conjunction with There Will Never Be Silence: Scoring John Cage’s 4’33”, on view at MoMA from October 12, 2013 to June 22, 2014.
Cage’s 4’33” is four minutes and thirty-three seconds during which no note is played. The point was never silence - it was to move attention off the performer and onto the ambient sound already in the room. As Cage put it later, “What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds.”
So the map asked visitors to record the “silence” around them on their phones, submit it to MoMA’s SoundCloud dropbox, and note where they were standing. Selected recordings went onto the map.
It ran on the same system built for the MoMA Studio: Common Senses Sound Map the year before - Ruby on Rails, Leaflet, and the SoundCloud API - pointed at a different question.