Reading Blog #2

Searching for silence touches on a pretty important article in the art world regarding music. The key idea here is that even silence can be music or rather music doesn’t necessarily have to adhere to the traditional boundaries in music. While conventional art had breakthroughs with people like Duchamp, music had been static in development, the styles remained the same for a long time up to the modern era of the 20th century. The development we had with John is pretty crucial for the music we have today. I find this especially prominent in electronic music and its various applications whether that’d be actual music composed around electronic sounds or special effects included in music and soundtracks. I think it's also crucial that this came from someone who wasn’t widely accepted in the music world because this only accentuates the atmosphere at this time. This change and these ideas didn’t come from somebody with authority. Music itself was still a small field of expertise and the fact that you could make music out of any sound opens the world of music for people who don’t have experience in traditional instruments. For me, this goes to show chaos theory in mathematics which states that within a chaotic random environment, there is a certain order that can be found. Music can be developed from these seemingly random sounds and things that don’t harmonize can do so in the right environment. That's why we have modern music and modern sound effects, plenty of music now uses non traditional "instruments" and tones but people will go and listen when they exist in the right condition. John Cage opened a new world of music when everything was static.