Wanting to preserve and protect the currency of my profession, I recently had my ears checked. Acknowledging their auditory years of active service, the specialist was pleased with my hearing given their age and sonically focused wear and tear.
While it’s true, my work has required thousands of hours of immersive listening, producing music requires another, equally important focus.
Silence.
Silence is a skill I’ve nurtured over my years as an audio producer for artists, weaving silence and sound in their diverse and divergent musical creations.
“Music is not in the notes, but in the silence in-between.” is oft credited to Mozart, Debussey and a host of other notable composers. Yet their assertion is not solely about music.
The older I get, the more I appreciate silence as a necessary component for meaningful composition. There’s a symbiotic sustenance between silence and sound, between the audible and the inaudible, in all forms of communication.
Silence separates sound from what was and what is to come, down to the millisecond.
It’s the space where we quiet ourselves.
Where we wait.
Holding our breath in the lull of life.
The solitude of silence is a balm to our overextended ears.
Found only when it’s sought, silence is elusive.
Enchanted by sound, the thrum of living can intoxicate our senses into a buffer against our own aloneness, that only searched and selected silence will absolve.
Silence in its deepest essence is humility.
It is the nothing between the something.
It is the fleeting moments between the notes of our lives, where we’re fully alive but not watching ourselves be so. When we engage silence – we play the music of life!
Featured image is courtesy of Aaron Burden via Unsplash.
For more silence between the words, check out the archive of Between the Notes and subscribe!
Roy Salmond is a record producer, working out of his studio Whitewater Productions in Vancouver Canada. He’s also an itinerant worship leader, speaker and writer, penning the weekly arts and faith blog: Between The Notes.
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