Mum’s
The
Word
Philip Liebson
The
April 5, 2010
30 seconds of silence
That was 30 seconds of
silence. Discomfiting? Unsure of whether
I had forgotten my lines or was in a state of narcolepsy or for some obscure
reason speechless? What were you feeling during those 30 seconds? Or sensing?
Was this truly 30 seconds of silence?
Of course not, if you focused
your senses you would hear dishes rattling, or sense the pulsations of your
heart , or perhaps hear a humming from some electrical apparatus or intrinsic
to your middle ear. On the other hand your other perceptions might drown out
the silence, so to speak- the ambience of the room, the play of light on the
wall, the architecture of the façade of the building across the street, not to
speak of the mystique of this podium. Perhaps from your initial discomfiture
you might have had thoughts of some perceived discomfiture you experienced in
the past related to a lecture.
Mum’s the word. It is a Middle English
word for “silent”. It appears in Shakespeare in Henry VI Part II, “seal up your lips and give no words but mum”.
Perhaps the title suggests an essay
about cloak and dagger or secret societies. – but no, I do not propose to delve
into the arcane mysteries of Langley, Virginia or High Street, New Haven. My
topic is silence. You no doubt have heard about the 4 minutes 33 seconds of
silence, a composition of the composer John Cage. More of that later. The
perception or the concept of silence has been attributed also to language in
general and even extended to the realm of architecture.
In all of these
attributes, silence is an entity in itself, not considered by its proponents as
the absence of anything but the presence of an entity. Can it really be
described in terms of the presence of something rather than the absence of
something else? In another context, Albert Einstein summarized the dealing with
concepts that may be applied to silence… “To
know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the
highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty…”.
Applied to silence? How can
silence have any possible relation to wisdom or beauty?
Well of course religion,
which we would admit, fulfills the Einsteinian formula, does use silence, and
we can certainly attribute this definition to the silences in great music, but
I doubt that any of you looking at the speaker during the 30 seconds of
“silence” would have experienced the highest wisdom or even considered beauty
of any sort. Nonetheless, if I am successful in my presentation, these
attributes to silence may be acceptable to you, and silence itself may be
recognized by you as a positive, palpable entity with energy of its own and a
form of creation.
We start with John Cage. I take you back to August 29, 1952 at the
Maverick Concert Hall, a rustic barn-like structure south of
There is no indication of specific audience reaction other than applause
(there is no evidence that anyone walked out). However, when it was broadcast
in 2004 by the BBC orchestra, the 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence was met
with several comments on the Internet, including:
“This
is clearly a gimmick; when he wrote this piece he was testing who was stupid
enough to fall for it. I thick you’ll find he wrote it on 01 April 1952”; and,
“I’m sorry, but this is absolutely ridiculous. The rock ‘n’ rollers and
the punks were wrongly bashed in their day, but this genuinely deserves a big
thumbs down”
Cage himself felt that it
was his best work:
“I wanted my work to be free of my own
likes and dislikes, because I feel that music should be free of the feelings
and ideas of the composer. I have felt and hoped to have led other people to
feel that the sounds of their environment constitute a music which is more
interesting than the music which they would hear if they went to a concert
hall”.
Presumably, the environmental
sounds of trees rustling, birds calling, and even audience coughing would
provide a realm of environmental music that would constitute the real
score.
However, Cage later
revised the score to a list of instructions during the piece, involving a
radio, whistles, a duck call, and manipulation of a deck of cards along with
other sound produced in which the performer blows the duck call into a
container of water, sticks objects into a piano’s strings, and blows a whistle
in random order..…need I go on? Cage therefore wanted to create his own environmental
music- However, this later 6 minute 40 second revision may never have been performed
and 433 remains his magnum opus.
When Cage died in 1992, an obituary in the NY
Times stated in part that 433 “…was to
call attention in a formal context to the richness of ambient sound: to tune an
audience’s ear to ever present sonic wonders, and to enrich lives through
meditative awareness.”
There are at least 24 musical
compositions which consist mostly or entirely of silence, such as the “Nutopian
National Anthem” by John Lennon, “Two Minutes Silence” by Lennon and Yoko Ono,
and “The Ballad of Richard Nixon” by John Denver.
For Cage, there was really no
such thing as absolute silence. Sometine in 1951 or 1952, he visited the
Harvard anechoic chamber where no sound could enter the room. Cage actually
heard two sounds, one high and one low. The engineer in charge told him that
the high one was the nervous system in operation anhd the low one the blood in
circulation. Someone with more of a background in physiology indicated that
Cage was actually hearing sounds emanating from his auditory nerve due to
middle ear problem. Nonetheless, this indicates that even in a room where 99.8%
of sound waves can be absorbed, silence cannot be achieved.
In a lecture in 1957 entitled
“Experimental Music”, Cage expanded on the ramifications of soundlessness. “Sounds occur whether intended or not…
This….leads to the world of nature, where…one sees humanity and nature,not
separate, …(but) in a world together”.
This may be a reflection of Zen, where silence and sound are part of the
same continuum, where silence is a positive effect, not an absence.
Certainly, silences in music
could be considered quite positive: the silence in Handels Messiah before the
tympani pounding cliumax, the ending of Haydn’s String Quartet, when the audience applauds a brief silence
before the music begins again, and, the silence as a setup in his Surprise
Symphony. Beethoven used silence in the first movement of the Eroica and at the
beginning of Coriolan as part of the basic conception of the music, as did
Chopin in the last part of his F minor Ballade, where after a triple fortissimo
measure, a double pianissimo set of chords is followed by four measures of
silence, a setup for a fortissimo exposition.
In
connection with this, an editorial appeared in the medical journal Heart in
2006 entitled “The sound of silence is music to the heart”. It is in response
to a study by a team of researchers entitled: cardiovascular, cerebrovascular,
and respiratory changes induced by different types of music in musicians and
non-musicians: the importance of silence. They studied a random discontinuation
of music for 2 minutes and found that respiratory frequency, blood pressure and
heart rate decreased to below baseline levels of when music was being heard.
The authors of the research study suggested that the tempo of music was
important in determining physiologic response.
When extrapolated to 433 this
suggests that the silence can be useful in moderating a fast heart beat or a
higher blood pressure. In fact, when we record blood pressures in our
hypertension clinic we have the patient lie in a quiet room for at least 5
minutes before the first blood pressure is taken.
Thomas Clifton , a contemporary
musicologist, wrote an essay entitled The Poetics of Musical Silence. To quote
him “To focus on the phenomenon of
musical silence is analogous to deliberately studying the spaces between trees
in a forest: somewhat perverse at first until one realizes that these spaces
contribute to the perceived character of the forest itself, and enable us to speak
coherently of ‘dense’ growth or ‘sparse’ vegetation”. In other words,
silence is the servant of sound.
In addition to the examples
of the use of silence in classical and romantic music that I have cited, there
was a further utilization of silence by the
Arnold Schönberg’s Sechs
Kleine Klavierstücken begins with a rest and the sound that follows alternates
with silence, each breaking into the other. Unfortunately, it is difficult for
the listener on first hearing the work to realize that the score begins with a
silence.
It is possible for sound to
supplement silence is a musical composition. A string Quartet by the Italian
composer Luigi Nono (not a republican) Fragmente Stille, An Diotima, consists
in part of long silences surrounding short fragments. This tends to make the composition
discontinuous. Here again, the listener hears the memory of the sound grouping
through the silences. To quote Nono “There
is more sound volume in many silences than in a fortissimo from a Beethoven
piece”. The periods of silence may produce a particular variety of the
previous sound that may vary from listener to listener.
One must also consider
relative silence as when various instruments a appear and end in a symphony,
concerto or string quartet. The silence of one instrument adds emphasis to the
instruments that are still playing, and there is also the anticipation of the
silent instrument again arising in sound.
Of course, in music, the
obverse of silence is sound. However, the persistent repetition of sound can
lead the listener either to forget that it is there or to cast a hypnotic
spell. For example, Philip Glass’s repetitive motifs do create a feeling of
mystical calm perhaps like a series of closely following waves lapping a shore.
On the other hand, the background noise that accompanies commercials on the
radio or muzak in the supermarket or elevator is now so pervasive that one
hardly recognizes it as an entity of sound.
The idea of background
music has some interesting forebears. In the early 20th century,
Erik Satie, the Dadaist composer and the painter Ferdinand Leger were dining in
a restaurant where the orchestra was playing too loudly for Satie’s comfort.
Satie commented to Leger that there was a need to create “furniture music” that
would blend with surrounding noises, “masking
the clatter of knives and forks without drowning it completely. It would fill
up awkward silences…and neutralize the street noises…”. Unlike Cage, Satie
created environmental sound with music. A manuscript of Satie found after his
death was entitled Vexations, an apt title, for the work consisted of 34 bars
of music repeated 840 times. It is performed occasionally and listeners and
performers sometimes get a feeling of hallucigenic effects or a suspension in
the passage of time.
It should be noted that the
impact of this work is in time lengths of the fragments, not the harmony. In
fact, Cage recognized this impact as contrary to early music in which the
interplay of harmonies had the great importance. To quote Cage: “With Beethoven the parts of a composition
were defined by means of harmony. With Satie and Webern they are defined by
means of time lengths. The question of structure is so basic….that one must now
ask: Was Beethoven right or are Webern and Satie right?” As you might
expect, Cage answered unequivocally that Beethoven was in error and felt that
his influence “has been deadening to the art of music”.
At this point some of you
may have been pondering the reason for the 4 minute 33 second length of the
Cage composition. In fact, the old 12 inch 78 rpm vinyl records allowed for
music of that length. Around the time of the first recital of 433, the Supreme Court
was deciding upon whether Muzak piped into elevators and restaurants was a
public nuisance. The majority decided that broadcasting music was not
inconsistent with public convenience, comfort and safety and ”tends to improve the conditions under which
the public ride”. In fact, in early 1952, a juke box at the
Cage’s work and the idea of
silence as a musical form had significant consequences. For Cage himself, his contributions
to music (and its counterpart silence) were rewarded not only by his
appointment in 1961 as a Fellow in the Center of Advanced Studies but as a
Charles Eliot Norton lecturer at Harvard, an honor accorded to such other
composers as Hindemith, Copland, Bernstein and Stravinsky. When Cage died of a
stroke at the age of 80 in 1992 the Village Voice urged its readers to observe
4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence.
Cage himself wrote a sequel
if I may call it that to 4 33 in 1962 with a title 4’33” (No. 2) or alternatively)
0’00” in which no music was performed but the performer could provide some
planned action (aside from a musical composition) and that no two performances
would be the same. Cage had dedicated this to one of his students, Toshi
Ichiyanagi whose wife at the time happened to be Yoko Ono. Seven years later,
Ono, was now married to John Lennon and they composed a recording entitled
Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the
Lions which included a track called “Two Minutes of Silence”, as noted
previously.
Others of the avant-garde of music
composition included not only silence in their works but also an invitation to
the audience to do anything they wanted during the piece, presumably in a
concert hall, not a restaurant or ice skating rink. Planned activities written
into the score include the release of butterflies into the performance area and
the offering of a bale of hay and a bucket of water for the piano to eat and
drink
Let
us go into a more broadly evaluation of silence. In my research for this essay,
I came across a thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Arts in the
Department of Communication of
The quotation:” Nothing has changed the nature of man so
much as the loss of silence.
The invention of printing, technics, compulsory education – nothing has
so altered man as this lack of relationship to silence, this fact that silence
is no longer taken fort granted, as something as natural as the sky above or
the air we breathe.
Man who has lost silence has not merely
lost one human quality, but his whole structure has been changed thereby.”
Miller’s thesis is an examination of the
social patterns that shape and interpret silence.
The basis of sound or of any
energy is vibration, and the absence of vibration constitutes true silence. It
has been suggested by R. Murray Schafer, a Canadian composer and
environmentalist and Miller’s mentor, who started soundscape studies at Simon
Fraser University, that aside from no sound at all before the big bang at the
beginning of the universe, there was an ”undifferentiated
endless sound that could be the underlying condition of silence”. After
all, if there is a background constant sound throughout the universe, it would
not be heard as sound. Continuous sound levels create adaptation that decreases
the threshold of sensitivity to the ear.
The
idea of a constant background sound at the beginning of the universe was also postulated
by Lucretius. In the Indian Tantra, the stir of the Divine will is termed Nada,
which after three stages of “sound” that are unhearable until a “gross form”
emerges that can be heard as sound. Tantra is Sanskrit for “weave” and
encompasses an Asian body of beliefs working from the principle that the
universe we experience is nothing other than the concrete manifestation of
divine energy of the Godhead that creates and maintains the universe. The practice
of mantras results in an increasing awareness of cosmic vibrations (the sub
threshold sound not becoming manifest).
In some ways this may be
experienced in the anechoic chamber that John Cage visited. As was indicated to
him, he experienced the sounds from his own body and with their monotonous
repetition the sounds faded and a daydreaming or hallucinatory state was
experienced in which sound was either be suppressed or new sound imagined. This
may parallel the mystic experience of the Tantra. I emphasize that the sound
from the body that appear monotonous after a while are the sounds of breathing,
the heartbeat, and possibly the mild stimulus from the nervous system,
including a possible tinnitus from the middle ear. It is difficult to postulate
that the circulation of blood other than the sound of a possible throbbing of
an artery picked up by the acoustic nerve would be perceived.
It is possible to
experience self-induced periods of silence while going to sleep although still
conscious wherein there is a cessation of hearing. This experience has also been noted by astute
observers before a dramatic moment such as before an experienced accident or an
embarrassment.
It has also been remarked
from analysis of sounds that sounds that relate to communication such as the
barely audible murmur of distant voices may be perceived as quiet but that the
sound of wind moving through trees or rocks evoking more of a sense of silence.
We have discussed the
significance of silence in music. In speech itself, silence is of course
necessary in the spacing of words and phrases. Interposed silence gives rhythm
to speech. Three prominent profiles of silence within speech have been
considered: intervening silences, before-and after silences and deep silence.
Intervening silences establish the timing of
phrases. These silences are the oral equivalent of commas and semicolons.
Before- and – after silences set off figures of speech. Thus, while intervening
silences relate internally to an utterance, before-and-after silences separate
the flow of discourse with a parenthetical comment. Deep silences include what
is called stunned silence, awkward silence, turn-taking pauses, pondering an
idea, and the silence in an elevator. These silences are more noticed than the
two types of silence in a conversation earlier.
We have all experienced “body
language”, the facial expressions and body positions that convey information
sometimes more robustly than speech. We change our body positions in response
to the body language of others. This resynchronization of position can be
accomplished within 50 milliseconds of the body motions of others. The body
language of conductors to the same music betrays differences in emotional
intensity. Even the distances between individuals in conversation or in a group
betray attitudes between these people. The concept of individual space
protection is important in regard to this. Notices how people’s positions in an
elevator shift as people get off elevators so that spaced is equalized- a
non-verbal communication among individuals that space will be shared equally.
According to Max Picard, the
human face itself is “ the ultimate
frontier between silence and speech”. Aside from the mouth, “silence does not strive outward; it
trickles inwardly like dew”. The eyes bring “brightness into the gathering of silence in the face”….”The lines of
the mouth are like closed wings of the butterfly [in silence] and when words
come out, the wings open and the butterfly flies away”.
The design of buildings
and spaces can in some ways be a gesture toward silence. These spaces are
designed in various degrees of subtlety for modulation of voices, such as
library spaces, tombs, hospitals (I wish that were still the case!) and
museums. The grandeur of cathedrals and certain railroad stations may lead one
to awesome silence but even if not the sound of individual speech is muted.
Monastic discipline is associated with at least some reticence in speech, and
Catholic vespers carry a gentleness bordering on silence. Silent contemplative
orders are found in Catholic history and many Saints were noted for their
silence. In modern Trappist monasteries, silence is used to still profane
speech and facilitate “soundless
communication in mystery between humans and God”.
Silent prayer if of
course a part of Western religious observance and certainly in the worship of
Quakers. This is called a “silent meeting” and consists of sitting in stillness
instead of preaching sermons which may not meet individual needs. In one’s
private relation to God in silent meditation, revelations can be revealed and
then shared with the congregation. The purpose of meditation is a quiescence of
thoughts leading to what might be called a superior awareness. This has been
accomplished by a repetition of an aural or mental sound leading to a state of
thoughtlessness. It can also involve heightened sensitivity to all mental
activity leading to the same state. David Atkinson in his book Silence, the
Word and the Sacred (1989) wrote that “the
divine is revealed when the cacophony of life is silenced in a single moment of
illumination, which resonates ever outward to encompass the totality of being”.
It was
There is an archaic practice of a national
custom of silence on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh
month to observe the end of the Great War in 1918. Edward R. Murrow described
the sense of silence before the final exuberance over the end of World War II
as something akin to the silence between the counts of 9 and 10 at a prizefight
before it is over. Of course, historians have written about “A Stillness at
Freddy Lindstrom, erstwhile
third baseman for McGraw’s Giants and later postmaster of Evanston,
described seeming moments of silence
before cheers at baseball games during the depression : “Maybe it’s my imagination , but it always sounded like (the cheering
began) a split second later than it should have been, as if their minds were out of synchronization with what
they were seeing”.
Certainly there are cultural differences in
the use of silence. From first hand experience, I can assure you that New York
Jewish conversation avoids silence, like the plague, especially the long pause,
which is considered a sign of social malfunction, and that a millisecond of
silence by the speaker is followed by a tolerated interruption. My wife is
constantly reminding me not to interrupt her – she of course hails from more
genteel
Silence can be a means of
dissent or resistance. The student in the classroom who remains silent in
resistance to a teacher’s request may be a line of defense against either the
learning process or the teacher as an individual. With larger groups involving
boycotts for example, silence can be a strong tactic of resistance. Silence in
print can be a powerful weapon. In 1932, the editor of the
Silence has been used as a
way toward mediation. In
As far as I know, the only
club in which silence prevails by decree is the Diogenes Club in
By this time you may wonder
who was this this Max Picard that we have been quoting so freely . He was a
German Swiss theologian who lived from 1888 to 1965 and published a book
entitled The World of Silence in 1948. In it, he contrasts silence with
language. He sees silence as a restful state of the universe. The world of myth
lies between the world of silence and the world of language.
“The silence of nature is a conflicting silence from the human point of
view. It is a blessed silence because it gives man an intuitive feeling of the
great silence that was before the world and out of which everything arose. And
it is oppressive at the same time because it puts man back into the state in
which the word might be taken away from him again into that original silence”.
He sees history as living
in two different modes - visible daylight and dark invisible silence. “The silent side of history is seen a little in
the silent suffering of men and nations”. Time is interspersed with
silence, the days move in a rhythm of silence.
TS Eliot puts in his
perspective in Burnt Norton:
Time present and time
past
Are both perhaps present
in time future,
And time future contained
in time past…..
-Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only
living
Can only die. Words,
after speech, reach
The stillness…….
Incidentally, Picard, in the
World of Silence sees the opposite to silence in noise and in a parallel though
less poetic comment writes:
-
There is no
silence in radio or true words either….
-
Not only what exists already but also what
will exist in the future is occupied by radio in advance…
-
Past, present
and future are all mixed up together in one long drawn-out noise.
However, as an aside, there is
a redeeming quality about radio. When a child was asked about television at its
inception he replied, the pictures were better on the radio.
Picard draws a distinction between the silence
in men and of that in animals. “The silence
of men is transparent and bright because it confronts the word…Silence is
isolated and lonely in animals with a heaviness of stone. Animals are the
images of silence.”
Despite this it is the song of the humpback
whale that was projected into space by the spacecraft Voyager as the best
communicator to great aliens.
Certain passages from Picard exemplify the mysticism of silence:
“ -Chinese pictures are like figures in a moonlit mist over the world of
silence, woven from moon threads over the silence.
- The seasons move in silence through the changing year. Spring does not
come from winter; it comes from the silence from which winter came….In winter
silence is visible: the snow is silence become visible…Snowflakes meet in the
air and fall together on to the earth which is already white in the silence.
Silence meeting silence.”
This is reflected in The Dead from James
Joyce’s Dubliners where the snow was:
….falling faintly through the
universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the
living and the dead
It
is also also reflected in TSEliot’s Little Gidding:
-Midwinter spring is its own
season…
Suspended in time, between
pole and tropic
In poetry and literature,
silence as a concept abounds. Listen to Edgar Lee Masters:
- I have known the silence of the stars and the
sea
And
the silence of the city when it pauses,
And the silence of a man
and a maid,
And the silence for which
music alone finds the word,
And the silence of the woods
before the winds of spring begin,
And the silence of the
sick…..
And I ask: For the depths
Of what use is language? …..
We are voiceless in the
presence of realities –
We cannot speak.
ee cummings’ poetry is filled
with references to silence and voice. While cummings was still a college
student at Harvard he wrote a paper entitled “The Poetry of Silence” in which
he discussed the comparative forms and techniques of traditional Asian and
twentieth-century modernist poetries.
He provides an indication of his poetic
activity in the following poem:
….myself is sculptor of
your body ‘s idiom:
the musician of your
wrists;
the poet who is afraid
only to mistranslate
a rhythm in your hair,
(your fingertips
the way you move) the
painter in your voice
beyond these elements
remarkably nothing is.
and:
silence
.is
a
looking
bird:the
turn
ing:edge, of
life
(inquiry before snow
Cummings is saying that the
most efficient way to render the unspeakable is to make it visible. In
cumming’s poetry, visible silences are found between and within words in the
form of blanks.
The portrayal of color in some
sense involves a silencing of language. Language cannot convey the emotion s
produced by color. Words like “vivid”, “pretty” do not at all articulate the
way colors speak to the senses. No one can describe a color. However, colors
described in poetry can convey mental images that may produce varied emotional
reactions by different readers or listeners.
For example, here is a poem
by William Carlos Williams:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Very much like cummings in the
lack of capital letters and the spacing of words. To me, the poem’s
protagonists so to speak, the rainwater, the red wheelbarrow and the white
chickens invoke a vivid memory from my childhood of drops of rain on a red
metal chair with a border of white flowers and more generally the sense of
freshness after a rainstorm and the electric stillness. But I cannot describe
the sensation of the colors themselves.
In art and architecture,
there is a sense of creation out of a visual silence. Andre Malraux in the
Voices of Silence published in 1953 grapples with the concept of how great art
and sculpture of the past can break through the silence of centuries to reach
us with understanding of its intentions. It is my feeling that although the
“voices” of art and sculpture are the same whether seen in our times or in the
times past, these voices are saying different things to the observer depending
upon the century of observation. Certainly the iconography of the medieval
period displayed in art and in the
stained glass windows of the cathedrals portrays though its “voice” an
emotional content that we have not had
the environmental milieu to appreciate. For Picard, images such as these remind
man of “life before the coming of
language”. It is my experience as I walk through the galleries of a museum
that the silence that is ever present even in the most crowded galleries tends
to minimize the “voices” within the paintings.
Picard in his book on
silence noted that in the past the when silence was “a more active influence
than noise” there was an importance attributed to silent omens: the silent
flight of birds, the appearance of clouds in the sky and the other “silent
motions of nature’”.
The architect Louis I. Kahn, in his book
Silence and Light contrasted silence as the immeasurable with light as the
measurable. Architecture for him was the threshold between silence and light, as
for Picard the world of myth lies between silence and language. In some sense,
we get this feeling in some of the surrealistic paintings of Chirico where
shadows starkly demarcate the emptiness of space and the concrete structures. Kahn equates silence in the development of
architecture as an ambience out of which light and structure are developed,
containing in itself a desire to be. “All
material in nature, the mountains and the streams and the air and we, are made
of Light which has been spent, and this crumpled mass called material casts a
shadow, and the shadow belongs to Light”.
Again we see a reflection in
the poetry of TS Eliot, from the Hollow Men:
Between the desire and the spasm…
Between the potency
And
the Existence
Falls the Shadow
For Max Picard, the Pyramids
“seem like fortifications, built by
silence for itself when it retired from the earth; from which silence can
conquer the earth again some day… The silence of the stars look down upon them
and casts a spell on them”.
As night descends upon us, if
we listen carefully, we can hear the shadows of silence amidst the budding
leaves, and between the lapping of waves. And so we end this disquisition, not
with a bang but a wimper.
Sources
Eliot TS. The complete poems and plays 1909-1950. Harcourt, Brace and
Co.
Ellmann R , O’Clair R Eds. The Norton anthology of modern poetry. WW
Norton & Co.
Gann, Kyle. No such thing as silence. John Cage’s 4’33”.
Joyce, James. Dubliners. Penguin Books
Lobell J. Between silence and light. Spirit in the architecture of
Louis I. Kahn. Shambhala.
Malraux A. The voices of silence. Doubleday & Co. Garden City,
Miller W. Silence in the contemporary soundscape. Thesis submitted in
partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts.
Picard M. The world of silence. Eighth day Press