Drawing a Map of Musical Silences in the Age of Recorded (and Synchronised) Music

Silence has been a recurring subject of aesthetic and philosophical analysis, often explored through a music-specific lens. Several taxonomic systems have been proposed to classify musical silences and their expressive capabilities, drawing from diverse approaches and perspectives. However, these theoretical frameworks are frequently problematic. First, they are often rooted in predominantly metaphysical, if not mystical, interpretations-a tendency influenced by the generalist literature on the topic and John Cage's pivotal role in shaping discussions around silence in music. While this approach yields rhetorically compelling and evocative descriptions, it often lacks clarity when addressing how musical silences are experienced and how they contribute to the communicative power of music. Second, the examples underpinning these taxonomies predominantly derive from the European art music canon, focusing on its written traditions or, at best, their live performances. As a result, significant dimensions of silence associated with recorded music and popular or folk traditions are overlooked. This narrow scope excludes a broader range of examples from diverse repertoires that could deepen our understanding of the role and functions of silence in music. This paper seeks to address these gaps by systematising existing taxonomies of musical silence, clearly discriminating mystical, metaphysical, and transcendental silences from those that can be studied through more empirical and scientific approaches. Furthermore, it introduces new categories of silence that are uniquely relevant to recorded and synchronised music. These include silences that deal with technological matters like the stereophonic space or with the analogue or digital nature of the recording, with mixing volumes and automations, but also with other systems of signs that can come into play when analysing synchronised (or even interactive) music and their meaningful silences. Employing a mostly phenomenological lens, the study lays a robust foundation for subsequent semiotic investigations into the multifaceted nature of musical silence, thus enabling a subsequent shift from a systematic-nomothetic perspective to a hermeneutic-idiographic one, facilitating more nuanced and fine-grained interpretations of the meanings that silence can embody in various musical contexts.