Silent Film and Foley Artists

Did you know that the lack of sound in silent film was not a question of technological limitations but an aesthetic decision? If you don’t, check the guys at You Look Nice Today who produced a nice video to honor the early foley artists who embraced the “purity of silence”…

Read Full Post »

Bernhard Günter – un peu de neige salie

“Music stands out from silence and has need of silence in the same way that life has need of death, and thought (…) has need of nonbeing. As something similar to a work of art, life is an animated, limited construction that stands out against lethal infinity; and music, as something similar to life – [...]

Read Full Post »

“Music itself is some sort of Silence…

…because it imposes silence on noises and before all else the most unbearable of these noises are words. Music is the silence of words, like poetry is the silence of prose, it makes the gravity of logos more bearable and prevents men to identify with the act of speaking. The conductor waits till the audience [...]

Read Full Post »

The Quietest and Biggest Anechoic Chambers of the World

If you are into superlatives, here are two dealing with anechoic chambers. The acoustic anechoic chamber has an absorbing surface and is shielded from the outer world in order to investigate sound waves with all reflections being removed (more recently there are radio frequency anechoic chambers as well). The experience visiting such an anechoic chamber [...]

Read Full Post »

The Sound of the City in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education

Gustave Flaubert searched with exhaustive care for evidence, documents and testimony to authenticate the account of France’s social classe and the political uproar through the revolution of 1848 that was expressed in his highly influencial novel “Sentimental Education” in unrivalled manner. His description of daily live sounds is particularly evocative, here is what his protagonist Frederic Moreau [...]

Read Full Post »

Silence in the Words of…

Silence a boundary notion, a conceptual ideal, an aural vanishing point. Saying something about silence equals loosing it. Being silent is impossible may it include to cease living. Many words have been uttered to grasp this paradox.
There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.
No Silence exists, that is [...]

Read Full Post »