the affect of silence in m. crow’s “hungry”

In consideration: \”Hungry,\” by Maisie Crow

Though my forte is radio, my official job title at the Art + Media House is “multimedia instructor.” I have interpreted this role to mean that the class begins with the medium of sound and then moves forward to figure out how to integrate sound with other media. “Audio slideshows” are one such synthesis, in which still images are added to produced audio (or vice versa). Most newspapers have these on their websites these days, from the New York Times to even the Bradenton Herald (the independent paper covering former home of Sarasota, FL). Despite the acceptance of the audio slideshow to mainstream journalism culture, I have had a difficult time finding slideshows that I like enough to show to my students. Usually, the slideshows are either “photo heavy” or “sound heavy,” or in other words, the producer was clearly skilled at one element of production and not the other. Some listserv activity lead me to the above-posted multimedia work by Maisie Crow, photojournalist for the Howard County Times. Crow’s “Hungry” is really a leap ahead in digital storytelling, combining not only photography and audio but brief segments of video as well.

What I wish to discuss in this article is not Crow’s adeptness for finding coherency between sound, image, and moving image, but actually how she captures the viewer by relating these three elements to their opposite: silence. Drawing on conversations with about the piece with peers and students, listserv buzz, and my own emotional responses to the work, my interest here is the emotional affect of the presence of silence within the work.

In the scene in question, the father says, “In the past, it was always kids with Prader-Willi Syndrome are short and fat and, retarded.” On the word “retarded,” there is a shot of Max leaning in a school desk, with just enough peripheral space on either side for the viewer to know that he is separated from others; a sign reading “No Talking Please” is prominently displayed. The father continues, “And they’re not short and fat.” He sharply exhales. A long silence, almost eight seconds. “…and retarded,” the father concludes.** In these two words, his voice is now breaking, deeply contrasting with the strength of his voice that marks his narration throughout. Another five-second silence before the father begins a thread on how Max becomes the victim of discrimination.

This moment in Crow’s piece is so poignant because it plays with our expectations. Preceding the silence(s), the father first states the expectations: kids with Prader-Willi Syndrome are short, fat, and retarded. He then qualifies the statement: my son is not short, and not fat. The complicity of silence begs from the father, is he retarded? His pause at first sounds mean, but then there is the sharp exhale, where we realize that something is happening in the father in his state of reflection. And when he finally utters, “and not retarded,” the sadness in his voice is so profound and unexpected  that we chastise ourselves for thinking that his pause might have been the set-up to a cruel joke upon one’s own son. I admit that this is only one reading of this moment, though I did observe that during a conversation with another youth educator, he analyzed the silence similarly without any prior analysis from me.

A conventional way of thinking about silence is that it is merely the space between the sound. This is, after all, exactly what this looks like in an audio editing suite: the valley between two peaks. But let us consider a passage John Cage’s essay, “Composition as Process”:

What does [the mind] do, having nothing to do?…What happens, for instance, to silence? That is, how does the mind’s perception of it change? Formerly, silence was the time lapse between sounds, usefully towards a variety of ends, among them that of tasteful arrangement, where by separating sounds or two groups of sounds their differences or relationships might receive emphasis; or that of expressivity, where silences in a mutual discourse might provide pause on punctuation; or again, that of architecture, where the introduction or interruption of silence might give a definition to either a predetermined structure or to an organically developing one. Where none of these or other goals is present, silence becomes something else–not silence at all, but sounds, the ambient sounds. The nature of these is unpredictable and changing. These sounds (which are called silence only because they do not form part of a musical intention) may be depended upon to exist. ^

Cage takes as a given that silence is always present, and the results of its foregrounded presence will always be variable. But more importantly, by conceiving of silence as a cerebral construction and not solely as factual reality occurring in an absence of content, we may begin to understand (and therefore utilize) the specific ways in which silence may become a tool for affect.

Cage elsewhere says that music (or for our purposes, any kind of intentional sound) has four qualities: pitch, timbre, volume, and duration. By contrast, of these four silence has only duration. This is why the affect of silence is unpredictable–we don’t know its context, its intent, where it is leading us, or how long we remain in limbo until the next uttered syllable. Though while the affect of silence may be random, the same silence within a piece will systematically provoke the same mood or reaction in the audience. One student viewed the piece with me the first time I watched it after the end of class. When we watched it as a group the next day, I heard her sniffle in the heart of that silence, and she might have been tearing up a little by the end. She remarked in a lull voice, “it’s even better the second time.”

A particular silence may thus become as much a component of vocabulary for both speaker and producer. The stuff of silence is built from the unutterable, the inaudible, or the incoherent, which is why it is essential for audio producers to harness it–because these are the exciting, living-breathing moments that makes audio audio, and not print. It may seem natural for us to couch silence as the space between things, but when that space becomes noticeable and affecting, and, in fact, gets us more emotionally responsive than even words, a silence becomes anything but.

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**There are some issues here that one might choose to problematize in terms of how this piece frames developmental disability, though this is a theme that will not be explored here.

^ Cage, John. Silence. Pp. 22-23