The Power of Silence in Music

The part of a song I work on hardest is usually the part where nothing is playing.

Saying silence has a function in music is nothing new; every musician knows it. What interests me is what that function actually is. A pause isn’t emptiness — if it were, its length wouldn’t matter. But the difference between half a second and a second turns the same melody into two different things. So silence is material too, and material with a measure.

The reason, I think, has to do with expectation. A melody promises it will continue. When the promise is suspended, the listener starts completing the next note in their own head. When the sound returns, two things are heard at once: the note that was played and the note that was expected. If they coincide, there’s satisfaction; if they don’t, surprise. Silence opens the time those two need in order to exist. Stopping doesn’t stop the music; it gives the listener a turn.

Speech has something similar. A pause before a sentence announces the weight of that sentence before it’s spoken. We assume we go quiet because we can’t find the word, when most of the time the person across from us worked out what we were going to say before we said it.

I try to use silence deliberately in what I write, though I can’t claim I manage it every time. Held too long, the piece comes apart; held too short, nobody notices. I don’t know whether there’s a rule for finding the right length. So far I’ve found it by trying.