Inspired by Rest Notes, which are silent notes that indicate that an instrument should pause, either yielding the way for another instrument to rise or allowing the clear perception of the streams of flowing musical notes. A key to music appreciation is in embracing (listening to) the silence in between the musical notes.

Embracing silence is a reference to John Cage's "4'33" musical composition which does not feature rest notes but rather blank sheets of a musical composition. Cage performed his piece in front of his piano by setting the stopwatch for 4'33 minutes of silence (33 seconds, 2'40 minutes, 1'20 minutes). His concept was to engage the audience with the ambient sounds of the music hall instead of composing music where the outside world falls away.

Cage was influenced by Robert Rauschenberg's huge canvases titled "White Paintings", and by his encounter with an anechoic chamber, a room which is isolated from energy from its surroundings to maintain absolute silence, where he could hear a high pitched sound (his nervous system) and a low pitched sound (his blood circulation).

This concept lead the way to the rise of ambient music, my preferred music genre, which, as Brian Eno describes it, completes "rather than competes with the sounds of life."

These photographs are my interpretation of Silence, the topic for the final project of my Landscape Photography course at the Lebanese American University.