Dear Thoth,
Great to see you’re in the ether and your thoughts are floating in the air in a readable form! I loved watching your performances before rehearsals in Lincoln Center over a decade ago and a friend just brought me to your website. Just wanted to comment on this thought you have here if I may. In my opinion, and surely it can be argued, there is actually no silence, ever. In some cases music might be conjured up by silence, but in fact the ambient sounds and the hum of a motor can inspire sound to reflect it, contradict it, repair it or discredit it among other things. I think the use of electronics does in fact have a soul, which is what noise can represent. The soul being the noise, or resonance, of a static frequency. Really where there is no sound, where there is complete silence is in the digital domain. If you record nothing digitally, it is literally silent, but if you record nothing to a tape recorder there is still a hum or hiss underneath the surface. The goal of electronic music is to place the soul into the mechanics that we have surrounding us, doing this is easier when there is resonance already in the medium, but in the digital domain it is more difficult. There is a real danger there but we’ll figure it out! All the best and looking forwards to seeing you perform again someday! Raz

Wonderfully and thoughtfully expressed, Raz. Thank you for putting your perspective in my humble blog. The only response I have is: If we had some time (maybe a long time)to get together and have a dialectic, I would love to investigate the meaning of “silence” which, as you may have already extrapolated from my Thoht, is not the universe’s silence, but my own.

I know what you mean by silence being your own, that’s definitely a whole other manifestation of silence. I’m talking about within the space of the tunnel in Central Park for instance. We can’t have pure silence otherwise Pythagoras’s theory of the Music Of The Spheres wouldn’t be accurate, and by now his theory has been proved right by science.

Obviously the notes are coming to us because of the resonance of the space you are in, and with electronics (I’m primarily an electronic musician these days) the resonance needs to be amplified through loud speakers… not as easy as the direct link between your voice and violin and the space itself, but similarly the resonance of every loud speaker is different tunings, and then one can get into tuning the actual cables to make them resonate with the speakers more… this is something my friend Maryanne Amacher spoke about r.i.p. if you happen to have time to check her out.
Best wishes, Raz