The Sounds of Silence Podcast Transcript

Jesse Locker, Jon Pitt, Alison Carter and Cori Knight

[00:00:00] Jesse Locker: This past April, at the height of the student protests on the campus of Columbia University, John McWhorter, a Columbia professor and frequent New York Times contributor, published an op-ed with the title, “I'm a Columbia Professor. The protests on my campus are not justice.” In his op-ed, he complained that the protests compared poorly to those against apartheid he'd experienced in his youth, and he grumbled that the protesters were making life on campus impossible for him.To illustrate how disruptive they were, he gave an example from his own classroom.

[00:00:44] John McWhorter (actor): “Last Thursday, in the Music Humanities class I teach at Columbia University, Two students were giving an in class presentation on the composer John Cage. His most famous piece is 4’33”, which directs us to listen in silence to surrounding noise for exactly that amount of time.

 I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon because the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway, but infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building.

[00:01:10] Lately, that noise has been almost continuous during the day and into the evening, including lusty chanting from the river to the sea.”
[00:01:33] Jesse Locker: To be fair, McWhorter is not a scholar of music, but a linguist, and he was already notorious in certain corners of the internet for his bad takes on a whole range of issues. But the mockery from the internet, in this case, was especially swift and fierce. Blogs had headlines like, “This New York Times columnist should probably not be teaching John Cage to Columbia students.”

[00:02:01] And all over social media, people were incensed. Author and linguist Ann Zhao asked on X, “Hey, why does John McWhorter, a linguist, teach a music humanities class?” User Badger Wocky wrote,“4'33 is the perfect example of how a piece is re-evaluated and re-contextualized by the place and time it's performed in. This happens with all live performances, but as the whole point of this particular piece, I'm surprised that McWhorter missed the work's meaning so completely.” 

[00:02:38] These critics were in fact correct. Cage's provocative work is asking us to listen to the world around us, and silence is the or the impossibility of it, is a central theme in Cage's work.

[00:02:57] John Cage gained fame in the 1940s for his compositions on the so-called “prepared piano.” That is, a piano whose sound has been altered by placing objects, bolts, erasers, silverware, whatever you have, on a piano's strings or hammers. Bacchanal, composed in Seattle in 1938 or 1940, transformed the warm, familiar tones of a piano into a kind of frenetic and nearly unrecognizable percussion instrument.

[00:03:41] In the 1950s, Cage began to abandon traditional instrumentation altogether, growing more interested in the role that chants played in the creation of music. His imaginary landscape, number four for twelve radios, is just what it sounds like, the composition played entirely on radios. Hearing it performed even today is a strange experience.
[00:04:09] Black-clad orchestra musicians sit in their chairs, each holding a transistor radio, sitting attentively, waiting for the signal from the conductor to turn their radio knob. The work is completely different every time, and it's entirely determined by chance whether we'll hear static, a preacher, a snippet of rock or country, or a bit of muffled conversation.

[00:04:42] But 4’33” is even more radical than this. First performed, if we can even call it that, in 1952, near Woodstock, New York, pianist David Tudor walked onto the stage and remained silent for exactly 4 minutes and 33 seconds. Before the end of the performance, audience members started to shout, and one even threatened to run them out of town.
[00:05:17] Even Cage's own mother reportedly asked, “Don't you think that John has gone too far this time?” The main sounds his audience would have heard in rural Woodstock, New York were the songs of birds or the wind rustling through the leaves, hardly offensive sounds to the ears. 
But Cage was adamant that in listening to the world around us, whether ugly or beautiful, we have to take the messiness of human existence into account.

[00:05:53] In a 1992 interview, he posited that the silence of the modern world was the sound of traffic.

[00:05:59] John Cage: The sound experience, which I prefer to all others, is the experience of silence. And the silence, almost everywhere in the world now, is, is um, traffic. If you listen to Beethoven, or to Mozart, you see that they're always the same. But if you listen to traffic, you see it's always different.

[00:06:35] Jesse Locker: The Columbia protests aside, this incident raises a bigger set of issues. Is there even such a thing as silence? What are the things that are not [said? Are they only silent because we're not really listening? And more to the point, is it even possible to make a podcast about silence? 

This week we bring you three different perspectives on silence.

[00:07:15] First up we have Jon Pitt. Jon Pitt researches plant life in the context of Japanese media at the University of California, Irvine. His episode is called “The Not So Silent Lives of Plants.” Welcome, Jon.

[00:07:31] Jon Pitt: Thanks so much for having me. 
Jesse Locker: So what does silence mean in the context of talking about plants? 

[00:07:32] Jon Pitt: Yeah, I think a lot about silence, uh, in my research.
So on the one hand, I am studying literature and film, things that deal with language and sound. But I'm looking at plants, and so plants we often think of as, you know, These silent things, right, that are all around us, but don't really make any noise. And so the story that I'm going to present to you today, um, looks at how that might not actually be the case.
And that plants do in fact have, uh, you know, the capacity to make noise. Um, and that different artists and researchers have been trying to figure out whether plants are actually silent for a long time. So I look forward to sharing that information with you guys here today.

[00:08:11] Jesse Locker: Okay, let's hear it.

[00:08:17] Jon Pitt: If I were to ask you to identify the sound you're hearing right now, these little pops and clicks, what would you say? Would you guess it was some kind of insect, some kind of audio glitch in the podcast that you're listening to? Would you believe me that this is the sound of a living being under distress, and that this living being is in fact a plant?

[00:08:37] A tomato plant to be exact. These popping sounds were recorded by researchers at the University of Tel Aviv. According to a CNN report, said researchers stated that, quote, “When tomatoes are not stressed at all, they are very quiet,” end quote. However, when plants become stressed due to lack of water, the tomato plants would make about 30 to 50 of these popping, clicking sounds per hour.

[00:09:11] The world of plants, it seems, is not so silent, after all.
[00:09:29] You may have heard that houseplants grow better if you talk to them. If you're a plant parent, like me, i. e. someone who takes care of many plants at home, both inside and outside, then you've likely contemplated saying encouraging words to your plants. Maybe you've also heard that plants like to listen to music, or at least certain kinds of music, especially classical music.

[00:09:50] Such claims often stem, pun intended, from the success of Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird's 1973 best-selling book, The Secret Life of Plants, a work now derided as pseudoscience that nevertheless captured the attention of a global readership at the time of its release, with its claims to extraordinary capacities within the realm of plant life.

[00:10:14] Among these equally fascinating and yet dubious capacities is the ability to communicate with human beings. The Secret Life of Plants discusses the work of Hashimoto Ken, a Japanese electrical engineer turned best-selling author of the paranormal, perhaps best known for conducting experiments along with his wife, in which the two would attach a polygraph machine, also known as a lie detector, to a cactus, and with the electric current produced with the machine, give voice, as it were, to the plant.

[00:10:46] Footage of the Hashimoto's attempting to teach a cactus the Japanese alphabet can be seen in the film adaptation of The Secret Life of Plants. 

[00:10:55] Film Narrator: Mrs. Hashimoto looks forward to actual conversation with her cactus. Convinced that it possesses an intelligence, she is determined to teach it the Japanese alphabet.

[00:11:14] Jon Pitt: While some, like the Hashimoto's, have tried to give plants a way to speak, as if they were human, others have turned to music to try and imagine what plants may sound like, perhaps more on their own terms. Contemporary Japanese composer Fujieda Mamoru, for example, has experimented with turning the visual patterns of plant leaves into song, which has resulted in his Patterns of Plants series, recorded between 1996 and 2011.

[00:11:43] Does this auditory translation of a plant sound like a plant to you?

[00:11:58] Fujieda based his plant patterns on readings from a machine called The Plantron, which was designed by his collaborator, Dogane Yuji. A plant researcher who focuses on making plants heard a recent reissue of a collaborative piece by Dogane and Fujieda titled Ecological Plantron was released by EM Records. The website for which has this to say about the project:

[00:12:23] “Ecological Plantron was a CD released in 1994, the audio document of an installation held in 1994 at a gallery in Tokyo. The Plantron is a bioelectric interface developed by botanist Yuji Dogane. It was designed to give a voice to plants, using electronic means to make audible the energy of the natural world, prioritizing the non-human aspects of nature.”

[00:13:04] Now that scientists have recorded the sound of tomato plants in distress, we have further reassurance that the world of plants is not a silent world. We may need technology to hear them, but plants are making noise. I, for one, look forward to playing along with them.

[00:13:48] Jesse Locker: For our next segment, we have Alison Carter. Alison's an archaeologist in the anthropology department at the University of Oregon, and here she's exploring the concept of silence in archaeology. So, the question is, what does silence mean in the context of archaeology, and in your work in particular?

[00:14:02] Alison Carter: Yeah, thanks, Jesse. Um, when I first started thinking about this topic, I was immediately drawn to the idea of this question about what are the things that are unspoken? Um, as an archaeologist, I'm trying to reconstruct the lives of people in the past and people who in many cases did not leave a written record.

[00:14:18] So in that sense, the archaeological record is entirely unspoken, but it's through this examination and interpretation that we are trying to give people in the past a voice. So, uh, my discussion today is going to explore that a little bit more.

[00:14:37] Jesse Locker: Great. Well, let's hear it.

[00:14:42] Alison Carter: So, the archaeological record is intrinsically silent, and it is the archaeologists who are interpreting it and saying the things that were unspoken. But this also raises a kind of existential question, which is, are we really speaking for the people of the past? There's an archaeologist named Ruth Tringham who has said that “[a]s archaeologists, we are putting words into the mouths and heads of prehistoric actors, knowing that these words say more about us than they do about prehistory.”

[00:15:00] But then she continues saying that “without such speech, how are we archaeologists and the broader public to imagine the intangibles of the deep past?” So, interpretation is an important part of understanding and reconstructing the past, but who gets to tell these stories and speak for the silent archaeological record?

[00:15:20] Archaeology has often been practiced in colonial contexts, so in many cases, it was Western scholars, mostly men, who were the knowledge creators. But in nearly all of these cases, these individuals weren't working alone. They worked alongside and with the assistance of local people and community members.

[00:15:44] Here, I want to share the perspective of one of my colleagues, Dr. Udomluck Hoontrakul, a Thai archaeologist. This audio is taken from a Zoom panel discussion that she participated in on decolonizing Southeast Asian archaeology. 

[00:16:00] Udomluck Hoontrakul: Okay, so here is my recent project as an archaeologist in my PhD research.

[00:16:08] Alison Carter: Her research is in the Highland region of northwestern Thailand. She's not from this area, but made collaborating with local people a key component of her project. Part of her work wanted to understand the ritual landscape of the area she was studying.
[00:16:22] This is an important part of the intangible part of ancient life that Ruth Tringham was talking about, which is so often silent in the archaeological record.

[00:16:31] Udomluck Hoontrakul: In my thesis, I attempt to understand the different worldviews of people in perceiving landscape and the way that the locals, which are my teammates, told me about their stories and memories engaged with the specific places and landscapes have provoked me to question of the different worldviews and perspective on landscape and environment.

[00:16:51] And the past people must have been, must have perceived, perceived the landscape and place different from us. Therefore, in my research, I attempt to apply local perception and working experience to interpret the ritual landscape in the archaeological sites.

[00:17:06] Alison Carter: So she's considering that past people had a different consideration of the landscape than modern people, but she's using the perspectives of community members from that area, likely the descendants of the people she is studying to incorporate their voices into her interpretations of the landscape. 

[00:17:24] Later she describes finding these iron pieces in her excavation. In the video her images look like these kind of long corroded pieces that like are about the size of a pencil and some of them have these little kind of edges so they almost look like drawer pulls or handles on a cabinet.

[00:17:40] She didn't know how to interpret these objects so she asked one of the community members who worked on her project about them.

[00:17:45] Udomluck Hoontrakul: At that time I had no idea what they were and I then asked one of my team members who is a shaman and he replied to me immediately that these objects must have been belong to a shaman and I was curious and he then rearranged the possible shape of this object in this shape.

[00:17:44] Alison Carter: So, um, so in this way the local people are helping their ancestors speak by being co-creators in producing knowledge about the past.

[00:17:50] Udomluck Hoontrakul: Overall, I think the important point in accepting different worldviews and interpretation is that it will enable the community to give their voice in archaeological work and also in heritage management. In my opinion, this is the first step to involve the community in our work.

[00:18:13] Alison Carter: I just want to mention one last way that we can start to overcome the silence of the past. 

[00:18:25] So the Angkor Empire was the major power in mainland Southeast Asia from the 9th to 15th centuries C.E.. And the capital is based near the modern town of Siem Reap in Cambodia. And this site is really well known for its large stone temples.

[00:18:39] And many of these temples are bas reliefs, or images carved into the stone walls that depict aspects of life. Um, Like people playing musical instruments, for example.

[00:18:52] A scientific research project called the Sounds of Angkor has worked to reconstruct some of these ancient instruments and encourage contemporary Cambodians to learn and play them. And it is so impressive to hear them live. When they blew their trumpets, it was almost as if all of my internal organs were vibrating.

[00:19:13] So these are just a few ways that archeologists are trying to reconstruct a silent archeological past.

[00:19:46] Jesse Locker: So, our next story comes from Corey Knight. Corey is a pop culture scholar teaching at the university writing program at the university of California, Riverside. And her piece is entitled, Adding Voices to the Chorus, Disrupting the Silence of Consensus Memory. So, can you tell us a little bit about what silence means in the context of your own work?

[00:20:10] Corinne Knight: So, in the context of my own work, I see silence as the absence of voices. It's, um, In the sense that what we are exposed to largely in academia, K through 12, post-secondary, everything, tends to be from very limited perspectives. And what I'm interested in is the way that certain styles of pop culture are working to upset that.

[00:20:40] So, silence, if silence is the absence of that kind of diversity in voices, what we should be looking towards is building this giant cacophony. This representative, uh, chorus that gives us what we need in terms of a more full and resonant picture of the world around us.

[00:21:08] Jesse Locker: Great. Let's give it a listen.
[00:21:12] Corinne Knight: Today I'm discussing silence in the sense of controlling narratives around consensus memory and how we can disrupt that silence.

[00:21:19] Jorge J. Santos defines consensus memory as an agreement, socially, on a particular historical narrative, with attendant tropes and sanitization. Basically, this is the kind of history usually present in K through 12 textbooks. It's streamlined, it's sanitized, and almost always from just one perspective. This tacit agreement, shaped early on in our lives, persists until something comes along to unseat it, say, college history classes or museum exhibits, but realistically, disrupting something that intensely entrenched is exceedingly difficult.

[00:21:53] This leads, understandably, to a silence. There's a void where other voices and other perspectives aren't being heard, and the sanitization isn't being dirtied up with details. 

[00:22:05] The silence wraps itself around a lack of nuance that pervades our understanding of the past and our position in the present. 

[00:22:03] What, then, can be done to upset consensus memory and make some noise in the silence? One way that pop culture is filling the void is through graphic narratives. Often also referred to as graphic novels, think long form comics, graphic narrative is the term I'm using so as not to exclude non print production, like web comics.

[00:22:24] Scholars like Hilary Chute have been digging into non fiction graphic narrative's power for demanding reader engagement and changing existing structures. Hilary Chute asserts that through its spatial syntax, comics offer opportunities to place pressure on traditional notions of chronology, linearity, and causality, as well as on the idea that history can ever be a closed discourse, or a simply progressive one. 

[00:22:51] Chute also acknowledges the power of graphic narratives comes from giving voice to the unsanitized stories, and allowing them to movingly, unflinchingly document, display, furnish. They engage the difficulty of spectacle instead of turning away from it.

[00:23:08] Simply put, when you read a graphic narrative, you as the reader have to confront what's on the page in front of you. The words and images may be silent, but the narratives amplify the whole story, not just the abridged version largely agreed on in society. One particularly impactful example is from John Lewis's autobiographical trilogy, March, which centers on how he came to and participated as a leader in the civil rights movement in the U.S.

[00:23:39] A two page spread in volume three is a grim depiction of the aftermath of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. While this is a story most would know about in a general sense thanks to their history classes, the visual here is vastly more detailed and unflinching as it presents smoky, rubble laden rooms and external views, with panicked people looking for their loved ones.

[00:24:04] The only visual element representing one of the dead girls is a solitary shoe. There are no gutters on these pages–It is a continuous spread that forces an immersion. This isn't sanitized and there's no looking away. It forces the reader to, as Chute stated, engage with the difficulty.

[00:24:25] March is just one resonant example of the growing field of nonfiction graphic narratives that brings more nuance to our understanding of history. It adds voices to create a chorus where there has always just been a soloist. And in that chorus is diversity, richness, depth, and the opportunity to get something far more open than the silence of consensus.

[00:25:03] Jesse Locker: You've been listening to the sounds of silence. I'm Jesse Locker.

[00:25:09] Jon Pitt: I'm Jon Pitt.

[00:25:11] Alison Carter: I'm Alison Carter.

[00:25:12] Corinne Knight: I'm Cori Knight.

[00:25:14] Jesse Locker: And now we'll leave you with some silence.