Mar 24 2005
Random Acts of Silence
Yesterday on Whole Wheat Radio, I heard Jim say how cool it would be to do this (click to hear what Jim said). As soon as he said it, I said, “I’m doing it!”
If you tune in to Mud Radio today, you’ll hear mostly silence — not entirely silence as Jim suggested, but a lot of it. Here’s what I’ve done:
I’ve created a long playlist full of quiet songs, which will play all day long. In between the songs will be random periods of silence, anywhere from 10 seconds to 10 minutes of silence, sometimes more. That’s it.
Tip of the hat going out to Jim. I love this idea, and I hope you don’t mind me stealing it for a day.
The webcasting silence idea was NOT a complete flop (wow). For the first few hours, people would drop by, hear nothing and leave right away; or they’d hear a song followed by 5 minutes of silence, and then leave. Two or three people held on for about 20 minutes.
Then I decided to get on the mic between silences, though I still allowed much of the silence to play out. I avoided typing in the chat, but I did talk to and respond to listener comments in the chat. Then… things got a little whacky with Jenny and I listening to the music with headphones on while watching the full-screen visualization patterns generated by this WinAmp plug-in (we kept the mics on so you could hear our reactions). Then it just got stupid, and I wish we’d turned off the mics.
We eventually said goodnight to everybody, got off the mics and went off to watch TV for a couple hours, allowing the whole silence playlist to go on without our interference — at times there were 15 minutes of silence between songs. People tuned in and out, but the listenership didn’t go down to zero until about 10 minutes before we shut down the stream for night.
I’m not changing the name of Mud Radio to Random Acts of Silence, but maybe one day a week I’ll add the silence clips into the playlist so you never know when you’ll get a moment of silence… or how long it’ll last.
I’m getting into the good habit of not checking my stats when I’m on the mic, but last night I didn’t care — and couldn’t help but grin when I saw that 4 or 5 people tuned in, and stayed tuned in, soon after I got on the mic… even though I still let many of the silences play out. I thought the system was going to crash when I held 6 listeners there for awhile. I could say more, but I don’t want to get all mushy. It was fun.