The Discovery of Silence

Abstract

In the nineteenth century the camera suddenly revealed the nature of light. This revelation immediately had an effect upon the work of the Impressionist painters. A somewhat similar effect was created by the evidence presented by the portable tape-recorder, which suddenly made writers aware of the realities of ordinary speech and of the nature of silence. Recordings of ordinary people speaking had been available since the mid-thirties but on most occasions such recordings were confined to presenting rather formal statements of opinion and they tended not to include the hesitations and murmurs which are to be found in ordinary conversation. The people who made such contributions tended to speak in a rather stilted and well-behaved manner so that the listener could only get a very vague impression of how they might speak in ordinary conversation. But when the portable tape-recorder made it possible to take the equivalent of the camera shot of ordinary conversation, conducted by people who were no longer being made self-conscious by the presence of the machine, the nature of speech and of its silences was at last revealed.