Silence
Discourse analysis shows that people use brief silences to mark the boundaries of prosodic units, in turn-taking, or as reactive tokens, for example, as a sign of displeasure, disagreement, embarrassment, desire to think, confusion, and the like.
[2] Silence may become an effective rhetorical practice or communication tactic when people choose to be silent for a specific purpose.
[4] Strategic silence be an instrument in negotiations, debates, interpersonal relationships, and even broader social and political contexts.
This ambiguity can be leveraged to gain an advantage, create space for reflection, or even exert pressure without uttering a single word.
This may help explain why lone humans in relative sonic isolation feel a sense of comfort from humming, whistling, talking to themselves, or having the TV or radio on.
[10] Many religious traditions imply the importance of being quiet and still in mind and spirit for transformative and integral spiritual growth to occur.
In Hinduism, including the teachings of Advaita Vedanta and the many paths of yoga, teachers insist on the importance of silence, Mauna, for inner growth.
In some traditions of Quakerism, communal silence is the usual context of worship meetings, in patient expectancy for the divine to speak in the heart and mind.
[11][12] In the Baháʼí Faith, Baha'u'llah said in "Words of Wisdom", "the essence of true safety is to observe silence".
[16] Music inherently depends on silence, in some form or another, to distinguish other periods of sound and allow dynamics, melodies, and rhythms to have greater impact.
"[20] Barry Cooper (2011, p. 38) [21] writes extensively of Beethoven's many uses of silence for contemplation, for dramatic effect and especially for driving the rhythmic impetus of the music.
The substitution of such a note by a whole-bar rest therefore gives the effect of a suppressed sound, as if one were about to speak but then refrains at the last moment.
[22] Robert Schumann's song "Ich hab' im Traum geweinet" from his song cycle Dichterliebe uses silence to convey an almost gothic ambiance, suggesting the darkness of the grave where the dreaming poet imagines his lover has been placed: "I wept in my dreams, I dreamt you were lying in your grave."
"[23][24] Much has been said about the harmony of the opening to Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde, which Taruskin (2010, p. 540) calls "perhaps the most famous, surely the most commented-on, single phrase of music ever written."
[27] The contemplative concluding bars of Anton Webern's Symphony[28] (1928) and Stravinsky's Les Noces The Wedding, 1923)[29] make telling and atmospheric use of pauses.
Eric Walter White (1947, p. 74) describes the ending of Les Noces as follows: "As the voices cease singing, pools of silence come flooding in between the measured strokes of the bell chord, and the music dies away in a miraculously fresh and radiant close.
"[30] John Paynter (1970, p. 24) vividly conveys how silence contributes to the titanic impact of the third section[31] of Messiaen's orchestral work Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum (1964):Woodwinds jump, growl and shriek.
Suddenly the brasses blare, and out of the trombones' awesome processional grows a steady roar … the big gongs the tam-tam beaten in a long and powerful resonance, shattering and echoing across mountains and along valleys.
A frequently used effect, known as "stop-time", places silences at moments where listeners or dancers might expect a strong beat, contributing to the syncopation.
Keith Swanwick (1979, p. 70) is enchanted by the "playfulness and humour" engendered by the stop-time effects in Jelly Roll Morton's solo piano recording of The Crave (1939):[37] "If we listen to this, tapping or clicking along with the beat, we shalt find ourselves surprised by two patches of silence near the end.
