The Silence Opens Doors Project is a new media venture by that examines silence and noise as cultural phenomena. Looking at diverse disciplines such as art, science, spirituality, politics, and biology, the multimedia stories here will draw connections to explore how silence is a response to and an activation of our modern experience.
By approaching the topic from an interdisciplinary standpoint, The Silence Opens Doors Project teases out shared responses to silence, forming a sort of ethnography of a concept. In the Quaker religion, “friends” come together to sit quietly and listen to the voice of god and their own conscience, enacting a centuries-old tradition of finding meaning in the gaps in the sonic landscape. A band of astrophysicists is currently tuning their instruments to pick up the sonic vibrations that are produced when massive black holes smash into one another, in order to explode our common notion that the universe is silent and to finally find empirical proof of general relativity. Negotiating the quietness of film stock on its own, experimental filmmakers are pushing the boundaries of how we see sound. The syncopated rhythms of jazz are built upon a framework of sonic lulls, and improvisers across musical genres build an architecture of silence upon which to selectively insert melodic structures.
Whether it is withheld or imposed, sound also has the potential to be used as a form of violence. On one end of the spectrum, prisoners in the Tamms supermax prison in Illinois are held in perpetual solitary confinement. On the other end, recent developments in so-called “silent sound” weaponry point to the possibility of silence as a violent intrusion in the life of a targeted community. The concept of silence is key to understanding how power manifests itself in our daily lives. In this way, it is impossible to avoid the intimacy of the issue; our urban landscapes are getting louder and louder, with layers upon layers of humming machines, honking trucks, and beeping cell phones. It is vital for us as a society to recognize the myriad ways that we respond to and approach our acoustic ecology.
The absence of audible sound, then, is a complicated issue that cannot be explained in black- and-white terms. Our perceptions and interpretations of silence and noise are key to our sense of community, locating us within broader landscapes. The Silence Opens Doors Project ultimately strives to create a portrait of what drives our sense of connectedness through a series of interviews and collaborations with filmmakers, musicians, political theorists, scientists, and activists.
Understanding the challenges of bridging a wide range of disciplines and personalities, the Silence Opens Doors Project is built around the idea of experimentation and discussion. We have developed this website to simultaneously function as a blog, a sketchbook, and a discussion forum, in the hopes that a dialogue between the theoretical underpinnings of the film and between visitors will emerge.
Are you interested in contributing to the project? We welcome multimedia submissions of all kinds from journalists, filmmakers, and sound artists on topics that are appropriate to the Silence Opens Doors Project. Please send your idea along.
Chris Bravo is an experimental and documentary filmmaker currently living in Brooklyn, NY. Half Peruvian, he has spent time living and working in South America where he would probably stay full time if he wasn’t so fascinated with the American Revolution and the Branch Davidians.
Lindsey Schneider grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, and is now a Brooklyn-based researcher for documentary films and a new media journalist.
