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I wonder if John Cage's piece, 4'33", isn't more a performance rather than music. I say this because I've been thinking about it, and I don't understand how music can exist without silence. If music is in everything, including silence, how can we understand what music is. I think that a lot of the time we define something against what it isn't. What I'm trying to say is more eloquently captured in this quote by John Steinbeck "For how can one know color in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness?"

While there were sounds present during Professor Tian's performance, and therefore not strictly silence, I challenge the idea that silence doesn't exist at all. I think it's really interesting that the brain will supply a sound of its own in the presence of true silence, but I don't think this means that silence doesn't exist. Or, perhaps what I'm saying only proves the point that there is no such thing as silence. We only construct the idea of silence in order to comprehend what noise is.