Silence in the Contemporary Soundscape

Abstract

The concept, the word, silence, is itself a metaphor: “Of silence, paradoxically, one can only speak” (Tacussel, 16). Ultimately, a word like “silence” is underdetermined and ambiguous outside of a sentence. The sentence locates the meaning of the word. Silence, as a concept to be discussed, is only understandable as the turning point of a sentence, the specific relation of an expression to its fundament. This work has in part traced the way in which the word has become overdetermined with respect to discourse, and ideologically obscured with respect to the soundscape.

Silence as soundlessness doesn’t exist, in any absolute sense, as far as we are able to ascertain. Silence as soundlessness relative to audibility and measurability does exist, however. That is, silence in a particular area or communicative portion of the soundscape can exist as soundlessness, which implies that we are not referring to our heart beating, etc., but reducing our hearing or measurement to specific tasks: silence is that which we cannot hear or measure in a situation. Similarly, silence exists as reference to the ambience of a soundscape, so that “quiet” and “silence” become nearly synonymous. With this movement of the concept away from the purely physical to the relational perspective of a listener, ‘silence’ refers to communication, or rather, non-communication, irrelevance, a non-message. This allows silence to be used to refer to metaphorical situations in discourse, where silence can be construed as an absence of input, reticence, tacit communication, and the like. The silence of omission, the unsaid, and silence as a gag are metaphors which ex- tend from this. As a consequence of silence extending metaphorically to refer to a gap in communication, it becomes an ambiguous condition within discourse (the effects of which, however, may not be so ambiguous).