In the second section of Samuel Barber’s exquisitely mournful composition “Adagio for Strings,” the cellos, violas, and violins join together to build to a rising melodic climax, reaching a thrilling, almost keening peak of grief - and then sharply stop. There is a breathtaking silence that lasts several long seconds. Finally, after more than a few thudding heartbeats, the instruments resume their play with a series of soft chords that now seem painfully delicate, carrying the piece to its sighing, fading conclusion.
When you listen to “Adagio for Strings,” that brief pause two thirds of the way into the music is anything but empty; in fact, it fairly aches with woe. Of course classical composers, jazz musicians, and pop stars alike have always known the power of the pregnant pause. They carefully insert silence in between their notes, using it like a supple extra voice. It can be full of tension, humor, serenity, or dramatic finality, its character conditioned by the shape of the space it occupies. And now psychologists and neuroscientists are beginning to unravel why, exactly, silence speaks so many volumes.
For example last year University of Arkansas researcher Elizabeth Margulis showed that people hear pauses in music very differently based on the specific context of the silence. Using listening tests to investigate people’s responses to silences contained within musical excerpts, she found that participants perceived changes in both the duration and the amount of tension in the acoustic void depending on the music around it. Margulis also asked participants to report whether they had experienced “a sensation of beats” during a musical silence and indeed some listeners reported hearing subtle differences in what they perceive as the meter of the very same silence—an astonishing, yet somehow intuitive finding. Silence, it seems, actually has a rhythm. The most rhythmic silence in Margulis’s study belonged to an excerpt from Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata, where a pattern of strong, then soft, beats had been clearly established. When the pause arrived, straight after a strong beat, listeners instinctively supplied their own answering pulse to continue the pattern.
It shouldn’t really be a revelation that this is so. University of California, San Diego neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran, an expert on visual perception, is one of many scientists who have observed that the brain, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Ramachandran uses this insight to explain the workings of various optical illusions. These usually occur because the brain automatically fills in any odd gaps in its retinal image, resulting in convincingly complete, but sometimes erroneous, impressions of the world around us. The brain appears to deal with auditory caesuras in much the same way. It deftly smooths out rifts in the landscape of sound by suffusing the quiet chasms with its own ideas about what ought to belong there.
Margulis agrees. In her study, which was published in the June 2007 issue of the journal Music Perception she writes that “impressions of the music that preceded the silence seep into the gap, as do expectations about what may follow.”
While this may sound like a bad thing—our minds won’t even let us enjoy a moment’s peaceful rest without attempting to cram it full of meaning!—the work of scientists at Stanford University’s School of Medicine suggests that the opposite is probably true. A team led by psychiatrist Vinod Menon used fMRI scans to look at the brains of volunteers as they listened to an unfamiliar18th century symphony, revealing that without pauses, the brain tends to get, well, just a little sidetracked when it hears long stretches of uninterrupted music. A continuous melodic flow allows our attention to wander, and overall cognitive activity is surprisingly subdued during these periods.
When you thrown in an unexpected silence in the midst of the instrumentation, however, neuronal activity spikes right away. Silence, it turns out, creates a veritable cognitive commotion in both the ventral and dorsal regions of the right prefrontal cortex. These are areas of the brain that are known to play an important role in learning and memory. It’s as if the pauses in the music trigger the brain to sit up and pay close attention, activating working memory and stimulating the vigorous processing of both the sounds we’ve just heard and those we’re about to hear.
Essentially the authors suggest that silence may be what prompts our minds to pick out “salient events"—the beginning of the next movement, say—from what would otherwise be nothing but “a continuous stream of undifferentiated information.” Silence doesn’t just affect the brain, either. According to Menon, the heart rates of his subjects often changed markedly during the pauses as well. Our whole bodies are profoundly affected by these moments of apparent nothingness.
So the brain abhors a vacuum, and works very hard to pour its own percolating predictions into perceptual gaps wherever they occur. At the same time, without these gaps—without some moments of stillness in the confusion of life—the brain would be hard-pressed to properly process the concrete details of the world. What a temperamental, contradictory creature inhabits our skulls.
But what delight arises from its contradictions. Who among us, after all, would give up the experience of hearing an electrifying pause in the middle of a sweeping musical movement? Time lengthens, tension builds, and thanks to science, next time you listen to a meaningful silence you’ll know that it does, after all, have a sound. It might not enter your ears, but that won’t stop it from speaking directly to your brain.
Source: http://www.inklingmagazine.com/articles/the-real-sound-of-silence/
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