DOI: 10.62425/at.1951257 ISSN: 2791-9382

Music’s Silent Threshold: Constitutive Silence, Noise, and the Listening Experience

Sultan Bilget Güçlüer
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This study examines silence in music not merely as the absence of sound, a technical gap between notes, or a passive interruption of auditory flow, but as a constitutive threshold that shapes listening experience, performance relations, aesthetic perception, and the formation of musical meaning. The study conceptualizes silence not as a passive void located outside music, but as an active element that can reorganize the ways in which music is heard, experienced, and interpreted. The article proposes the concept of “constitutive silence” and discusses how silence can contribute to the perception of musical time, redirect the listener’s attention, transform the performer-listener relationship, and allow sounds excluded as noise to be reconsidered within aesthetic experience. The study examines the relationship between silence, listening, and musical meaning within the frameworks of music aesthetics, musicology, art theory, soundscape studies, noise theory, and reception-oriented approaches. Methodologically, the study is based on literature-based conceptual analysis, theoretical interpretation, and music-centered comparative reading. Silence is evaluated within broader fields of musical experience such as rest, pause, waiting, performative suspension, environmental sound, ritual intensification, and dramatic tension; examples from experimental music are used as limited references that make this discussion more visible. The article also makes limited references to the manifestations of silence in visual arts, theatre, dance, architecture, and cinema. This comparative framework shows how silence can be considered not only as an auditory phenomenon, but also as a concept related to interartistic processes of perception and interpretation. As a result, the study argues that silence in music can be interpreted not merely as absence, but as a productive field in which meaning is aesthetically, experientially, and partly socially reconstructed.

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