One thought that stayed with me recently is the information input/output ratio for most people nowadays. How in this day and age we are so busy taking in information from all directions and don’t always get a chance to also put something out in the world. So a main area of interest for me has been how to make the listening process less mechanic. How can we make the listener engage with the sound? Make them part of their own input.
I found a similar idea reading Background Noise by Brandon LaBelle.[1] I was made aware that John Cage was also very concerned with the listening process and the way the public consumed music, and attempted to disrupt that through a series of “staged silences” and “staged noises”.
- Silent Prayer and 4’33’’ – staged silences aimed at commenting upon certain contexts, from the shopping mall, as domain of ordinary experience, to concert halls, as arena of musical aesthetics.
Black Mountain event (1952) – composed noise aimed at unsettling audiences and their listening habits; aims to liberate sound by erasing the ego of the artist, silence the singularity and allow sound to name itself.
“Preparing pianos, silencing Muzak, causing audiences to stir, the function of musical messages is turned inside out, deflected from the piano to the audience, from the consumer object to interior thought, in a self-conscious shuffling of definition: where is the source of the music and where is its space of reception?” [1]
[1] LaBelle, B. (2006) Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc, New York