4′ 33”

Although often described as a silent piece, 4′33″ isn’t silent at all. While the performer makes as little sound as possible, Cage breaks traditional boundaries by shifting attention from the stage to the audience and even beyond the concert hall. You soon become aware of a huge amount of sound, ranging from the mundane to the profound, from the expected to the surprising, from the intimate to the cosmic –shifting in seats, riffling programs to see what in the world is going on, breathing, the air conditioning, a creaking door, passing traffic, an airplane, ringing in your ears, a recaptured memory. This is a deeply personal music, which each witness creates to his/her own reactions to life. Concerts and records standardize our responses, but no two people will ever hear 4′33″ the same way. It’s the ultimate sing-along: the audience (and the world) becomes the performer.

http://www.classicalnotes.net/columns/silence.html

Tools for Life

Related to yesterday’s Human Development Forum session at the World Bank: my employer is now offering Life Tools targeted at non-urban/rural consumers in emerging markets – it offers consumers price and availability data on seeds, fertilizer and pesticides, and education services encompassing language lessons and general knowledge questions (would have mentioned it directly, but it was freshly launched in India today). To some extent it overlaps/competes with the Tradenet service in Africa - both are driven by SMS, although Life Tools includes a pre-installed Java application on the phone. Ultimately the success or failure of the market-prices service will depend on collecting timely and reliable information from the field, a non-trivial task.

Photo above of the application in action, being demoed by Jawahar Kanjilal the global head of emerging market services on a recent trip to Espoo.

Spent the last few hours wandering around a pre-dawn election day DC. The streets are quiet and the snipers (on the Whitehouse rooftop) seem relaxed. Ah, democracy in action.