Week 6

This week was about sound theory and how sound can affect us in many ways. The thing that stood out for me in this lecture was when Paul showed us John Cage-4'33. I have seen this before and of course I did turn off because I got bored and thought it was crap. Saying that, when it was played in the lecture it made me think more and understand the meaning behind it. I think I understood it more because I was around other people and you could kind of feel the people in the room who hadn't seen it thinking “What is this crap?” You could feel a sense of outrage that people would go and pay to sit through this when nothing is being played. John Cage would argue that something was being played because silence is still sound. But is it really? I believe he is right, I do think silence still counts as sound or music. You can take examples from today's music, silence is used a lot, for example in dance music, it is used before the music drops and kicks in and even in live music bands use it during shows. They would build and build and have a period of silence before they continue to play again and this clearly has an effect on the crowd as it builds up their expectations. This is the same kind of thing John Cage wanted to happen, for people’s expectations to be built up and for them to come to his showing and think this is going to be amazing, and then be totally outraged by what was played. It’s the shock factor that either makes people go wow, or say it is awful.

I think what Paul said is true; you do have to shock and be provocative to get people's attention nowadays. Look at most bands today, most of them are the same and hardly any stand out or make people think twice about them. It's people’s reactions that make bands big e.g. Sex Pistols music outraged most people, yet teenagers loved it and when their album started to get banned and songs got banned from being aired on TV and radio this made people want to go see and hear them even more, which in the long run made them more successful. They are now known as one of best bands of all time and they helped changed music because of two reasons. 1. They were actually good and people could relate to their music 2. It was the bad press and the outrage towards them which made people turn their heads and listen to them to see what all the fuss was about. For them this was good because it means their music was having an effect and that’s what any artist, in any field needs to do, create something that will turn people’s heads, even if it is in a good or bad way as long as they are looking at what you are doing. Because all the great artist’s whether it be music or art have become well known and great because of this provocative creativity.