Sound and Silence

In June 2023, I taught a class of 11 young people called Sound and Silence: Listening Practices for Today’s Noisy World as part of UMass Amherst’s Summer Pre-College program. We spent two weeks exploring different conceptions of sound and learning about the various ways that it—and its absence—shapes our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. This provocation from a 1991 interview with 20th-century experimental composer John Cage acted as our guide:

Students were initially confused—or at the very least, skeptical—of the video recording I showed them on our first day: Cage’s famous ‘silent’ piece, 4'33",where a conductor stands before their orchestra, raises their baton, and stands motionless for exactly four minutes and 33 seconds. But they soon got on board with our collective mission of exploring this abstract inquiry: What even are sound and silence? 

We made many attempts at answering this question, from traveling to Historic Deerfield to witness the haunting silences of history, to messing around with the knobs and dials of the high-tech recording equipment in the sound booths of the W. E. B. DuBois Library at UMass.

In retrospect, I realize the time we spent together was shot through with a perhaps surprising sense of boredom. While it was difficult at the time to muster the courage to direct these young people to wrestle with such abstract ideas, I can now see how important slowness, stillness, and nothingness were as methods for our learning community. In fact, this learning was never about holding students’ attention. Rather, the opposite: this class was about developing a way of experiencing the world that depended on us doing nothing at all—just opening our ears and letting life take us. This insight hit home when I sent students, equipped with field recorders, to explore campus on a sound scavenger hunt with explicit directions to document what they heard of the world in silence. 

It was a tremendous privilege—if a challenge—to witness these young people’s alternating patience and restlessness in thinking through the qualities of sound. But by the end of our time together, students were coming to me with this important insight: “I’ll never think about sound the same way again.” I trust that I sent these young people out into the world with a greater sense of playful curiosity and a willingness to lean into (as opposed to shy away from) big, unwieldy ideas. Cage would be proud of that shift in perception; he might have even said that our two weeks together were not only worthwhile but vital.

Jeremy Geragotelis is a scholar, artist, and composer currently working on their PhD in American Studies at UMass Amherst. They received their MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop in 2022.