Anthropology 295: Anthropology of Media

I really enjoyed the thoughtful analysis in class of John Cage’s famous piece, “Four Minutes, Thirty-three seconds.” The main point that I took away from the presentation was the way in which Cage ingeniously employed the use of silence, or nothing sounds, as a way of encouraging the listener to hear all of the sounds around them. This reminded me of the exercise we did in class in which we sat in silence in various places around campus in order to observe the soundscape around us.

One of the things that I noticed when we did this exercise was the way in which familiar individual sounds transformed to become a soundscape. For example, the sound of a car engine and a generator would blend together and fade back and forth to create one continuous sound. Also, familiar sounds, such as a truck backing up, would generally be easily identifiable to me. However, when forced to focus solely on the sound alone, the sound became much more difficult to identify, even though it was very familiar to me. This is also an important quality for 4’33”. In order for people to hear the soundscape around them, they must be able to take the individual sounds surrounding them and weave them into a continuous sound.

The other thing that I noticed while watching the video of 4’33” was that just as the reactions of the other audience members played a pivotal role in the experiences of each individual audience member, I found myself observing the reactions of everyone else in the class. These reactions, I incorporated into my own experience.