We Curate Futures: Seventeen Playlists, Zero Plays

The power went out during a storm, cutting off the constant electrical hum I’d never noticed—refrigerator, fan, the subtle buzz of devices on standby. In the sudden silence, I heard the rain with startling clarity, my wife’s breathing, the specific quality of darkness that has its own sound.

Silence isn’t the absence of music; it’s music we’ve forgotten how to hear.

For thirty-nine years, I’d treated silence as empty space between sounds rather than sound itself. But that night, listening to what I’d always considered “nothing,” I discovered silence has texture, rhythm, its own complex composition of barely audible elements.

We live in a world so full of noise that we’ve lost fluency in the language of quiet.

True silence reveals the music that constant noise masks.

The next morning, I sat in our balcony before the city woke, listening to what I’d previously dismissed as the absence of sound. But there was music everywhere: wind through leaves creating percussion, distant traffic providing bass lines, birds offering improvisational solos over the steady rhythm of my own heartbeat.

Silence is the canvas on which all other music is painted.

My son, during one of his thoughtful moments, asked why some music has “quiet parts that make the loud parts louder.” He’d discovered what composers have always known—silence gives music meaning, creates emphasis, allows sound to breathe.

The spaces between notes are as important as the notes themselves.

We’ve confused noise with life, quiet with emptiness.

What music lives in the silence you’ve been avoiding? What rhythms exist in the spaces between sounds? And what would you discover if you learned to hear absence as its own form of presence?

Silence isn’t the opposite of music—it’s music’s most essential element, the foundation that gives all other sounds their meaning.