There Was Nothing to Hear — Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

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TEE-ART-RB-CAG-01-M-BK T-Shirt

Piece

There Was Nothing to Hear Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

$ 2,345.00

Description

In 1951 Cage went into Harvard's anechoic chamber looking for silence and heard two sounds; he was told they were his nervous system and his blood. The print is those two traces inside a room that returns nothing.

A Author

John Cage

B Subject

Silence

C Aesthetic

Diagram · Typographic

Exploration

Cage went into Harvard's anechoic chamber to test an idea: that silence exists and can be composed with. The room is designed to return nothing, the quietest thing anyone had built.

He heard two sounds, one high and one low. He was told the high one was his nervous system working and the low one his blood circulating.

From that he drew the conclusion that organised the rest of his life: while you are alive there is no way not to hear, so silence is not the absence of sound but the absence of intention. What we call silence is everything that sounds without anyone having put it there.

The following year he wrote the piece in which nobody plays anything for four and a half minutes, which is not about silence: it is about the fact that in those minutes you hear the room, the audience and the coughing.

The physiological explanation he was given was probably inaccurate. The conclusion holds all the same.

Details