This might be a dumb idea, but i thought, a lot of people have talked about how "loud" silence can be.
It usually refers to social contexts where information is communicated inverbally, at such an importance that other types of communication stop.
It may also be when senses are acute and observing, but there is nothing to observe.
So here is my question: How can we put loud silence into music? And how can we engineer the loudest silence ever?
Characteristic 1: simple visualization & unexpectedness
→ Music with repetitive patterns and at some point, silence. There should be clear progressive indicators to make an audience believe or imagine elements in their head while the silence is happening.
Characteristic 2: duration
→ Obviously the longer we can keep this phenomenon, the "louder" silence becomes.
Characteristic 3: illusory silence
→ Using almost completely cancelling sounds, if they're used binaurally and on a lower volume it might seem like a literal "weighted" silence.
Example ideas on the former characteristics:
C1.1 - Sudden noise followed by silence: emotional screams, industrial textures, musical cluster. The silence becomes an aftershock and might force the listener to reflect or stay in fear freeze. However this might make the loudness of silence shorter too.
C1.2 - Long unfinished progressions. The trick would be a cyclic progression sequence that modulates always, like ii-V-I (simple example but might be longer or more complex progression) and at some point you remove part of the progression. The listener might be able to "bridge" the cycles in the silences.
Another pattern i'm seeing is that here i'm trying to engineer with a "SOUND, SILENCE" order and not "SILENCE, SOUND" order. Maybe using the latter order you can find other alternatives to this, like resolving a ghost progression.
I first encountered this idea by Maryanne Amacher that otoacoustic sounds may be use as musical objects. She separated A-tones (acoustic tones) from B-tones (first order DT) and C-tones (second order DT).
Now with that idea in mind i am currently making a fully otoacoustic album, mainly exploring DT (and not combination tones yet). Workflow #1 that i had was frequency shifting triangle waves by a lot (1kHz)^1 but this was like sounding like electric shocks to the ears and DT were unclear.
On the other hand i found a more complicated but more versatile workflow #2 to do difference tones melodies: still using triangle waves, i used scales with a set of harmonics higher than 10, and as any harmonic duo difference makes the fundamental tone frequency, this automatically created DT for the base reference pitch that i'd choose. So doing chords with those changed the color and height but kept a common DT. Meanwhile, automating using MTS-ESP Master^2 allowed to change the fundamental, and so the DT obtained.
1 A frequency shifter adds HZ to every partial, instead of multiplying like a pitch shifter would do. File is "otoacoustic distortion theory" 2 In the picture here of my DAW session, you see the notes table, automation of fundamental DT, and the notes ratios. Resulting "oto folk song"
Hi, i'm Tachy Bunker, born in 2005 and an experimental musician since 2020. I have released albums like The Second Cosmocide and Alien Metal Pasta, exploring microtones/difference tones/inharmonic timbre consonance and more common practices. My main goal is to live financially from making music & share the curiosity for new horizons in music.
My abilities with software are FL Studio, Audacity, microtuning stuff (mts-esp, Scala, Sevish Scale Workshop, Wilsonic...)
My musician capabilities are Throat singing, Piano, Lumatone keyboard, CRT-TV's and Alarm Bell, Harmonic flutes, Fretless bass, Kalimba (retuned), Drums & Percussions, Keytar, Overtone singing, metal (tetsuo) kit, and some more instruments.
