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[crowd murmuring, soft gong]
Barbara White: Several years ago, I found myself confronting a number of health challenges at the same
Barbara White: time, and one of the results of that was that I found myself becoming sometimes "allergic"
Barbara White: to music, which is a very strange experience because it is my vocation and also my passion.
[gong]
Barbara White: I ended up writing an article called, "In Search of Silence," and later started writing
Barbara White: pieces of music that had quite a lot of silence in them. Eventually, this led me to think
Barbara White: about a freshman seminar which would deal with the elusiveness of quiet and then the things
Barbara White: that aren't so quiet, such as noise, sound and music.
Barbara White: One of the things that's interesting and appealing about the freshman seminar experience is that
Barbara White: it's a shared experience by a small group who all have something in common. They're
Barbara White: all relatively new to Princeton. I expected that the students would be less interested than I am in silence,
Barbara White: but I found that a lot of them are craving it.
[layers of sounds]
Barbara White: For the first creative project, Katie chose to make recordings of a number of different
Barbara White: sounds and layer them on top of one another.
Katie Welsh: I recorded myself walking through autumn leaves; I recorded myself sneezing; I recorded myself
Katie Welsh: talking, humming, playing piano.
[layers of sounds]
Katie Welsh: So, I was inspired to do this project because I made this observation during the class that
Katie Welsh: silence was something we could move towards. It was something that was buried beneath layers
Katie Welsh: and layers and layers of sound.
Katie Welsh: It was meant to imitate the order in which I kind of strip away sound when I move toward
Katie Welsh: silence in my routine. My first step, typically, would be to go inside, take away the leaves
Katie Welsh: outside, take away the cars going by.
Barbara White: It ends with sounds that are very quiet and very compelling. One is sneezing and one is breathing.
[sneeze]
Katie Welsh: This project conveyed the concept that silence is something that we can't attain. We are living beings.
Katie Welsh: We are meant to create sound.
Barbara White: It's exciting to me to see how thoughtful the students are. It's also exciting to see
Barbara White: the creative spark emerging in the class.
Joshua Taliaferro: ... and she loved a little boy.
Damir Golac: Light a match and wait for it to go out.
Barbara White: Damir chose to do what we might call a performance or realization of a score by Yoko Ono in
Barbara White: which the performer is instructed to light a match and wait until it goes out.
Damir Golac: Light a match and wait for it to go out.
Barbara White: One thing that's interesting about it is that there's a lot of repetition that we might
Barbara White: find not to be so artistic, but if we look closely, we see that there's a lot of variation between
Barbara White: each instantiation of the lighting of the match.
Barbara White: Since the students aren't necessarily required to have any artistic background, one of the
Barbara White: things we are doing is playing a bit with the notion of what art might be and who might be an artist.
[yelling]
Barbara White: It's also valuable to look at what's right in front of us. There's this notion of looking
Barbara White: at things and making them special through considering them to be art, but then there's
Barbara White: also the idea of accepting the grit of everyday experience and making sure we pay attention
Barbara White: as it races by.
[layered sounds]