Subject: Re: About Silence From: Eliot Handelman <eliot@xxxxxxxx> Date: Sun, 12 Jul 2009 11:56:29 -0400 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>> > Since the very beginning of my research I had trouble modeling > silence. The silence is not just another pitch which has the ability > of not to sound. I think that silence has to be treated apart from > pitches, but I don't know how. A question is "in what way is silence an event in the way pitch is an event?" Consider that musical events are always durational events (which poses a philosophical problem as to whether the feeling someone gets from music is necessarily durational). Qualitatively, musical silence is (or can be) a kind of echoic extending of the last thing heard -- as in a big crash before a long silence, with the crash still in echoic memory. So silence is best seen not as "nothing" but rather as a durational extension of a preceding sounding event. Rather than theorizing silence, then, you need to theorize duration. In computational composing, as I practice it -- see below -- duration is the minimal & principle thing theorized. A collection of pitches can be surmised as having a single duration when we can surmise the likelihood of perceptual grouping. For example a fast scale ending on an accented long note will tend to be grouped as a single event -- it is a "shape." With these you make bigger shapes, until you can work out that you have made a whole piece. In my work, "shapes" recursively form part of macro-structural systems called "supershapes." Nothing in music is ever an end in itself -- with duration (of shape, of pattern of shapes, etc.) you can construct new rhythms and patterns. You can construct patterns of "silence" just as you can construct "the pattern of recurrence of the main theme or any of its transformations." It may be a component of a rhythm or pattern of rhythms, etc. Since the perception depends on whatever shapes come forward to the listener -- which bigger components we are in -- it is wrong to surmise that "silence" or "longness" are necessarily phrase demarcaters. How they function would tend to be determined by the music itself. -- eliot http://www.colba.net/~eliot/shape_web.html