What silence? Presence and sense

Silence is a complex phenomenon. Its ambiguity —or polysemy, depending on how you look at it— and its strong dependence on the context that produces it makes silence a communicative matter that is difficult to analyse, understand, and explain. A specific silence is never repeated; even an audiovisual silence, planned and configured in a fixed audiovisual product that can be reproduced several times is unique for each present moment. As linguist Michal Ephratt, a researcher who continually studies it, states, silence is difficult to define but easy to recognize. For all these obstacles and the difficul-ties added in their conception, the mentions of silence in scientific articles can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The academic literature on silence as an object of study is very scarce or, where it does exist, it is very specialized or limited to an extremely narrow field of knowledge or discipline (so much so that it is sometimes considerably removed from silence as a psychoacoustic phenomenon).In the last fifteen or twenty years, a timid change of trend has been observed in acade-mia. Apart from more contributions on and considerations of the phenomenon, this has included more open-mindedness, the inclusion of more transversal perspectives, and the approach of new fields of knowledge in which, needless to say, analysis of and theorizing on silence also has a place. These fields range from audiovisual, persuasion, and psycho-logy to areas such as human resource management and pedagogy.In this regard, if a single idea can be extracted from this proposal for a monograph, it is transversality and diversity. The organization of this issue covers very different topics, such as photography or everyday life during the pandemic, and cinema and science, indirectly showing how, as a cultural substrate of humankind, silence is everywhere; a ubiquitous phenomenon that only needs to be heard or addressed. Silence is within us. As philosopher Michele Federico Sciacca put it, nothing of me is far from me in the moment of silence. This need to listen to ourselves and even to understand silence has been fostered, often unconsciously, in times of confinement and uncertainty as well as by various means and media that may not even be audiovisual.With the article “Is silence a sound?”, Ángel Rodríguez Bravo suggests ten points to use as a basis for a cross-sectional theory of silence from a rational and rigorous perspective and suitable for several —if not all— fields of knowledge in which silence can be studied. The proposal remains true to the idea of silence as an acoustic phenomenon linked to the sense of hearing, but fortunately goes beyond the qualification of silence as sound or non-sound. Rodríguez travels briefly through contributions from philosophy and art, bioacoustics, psychoacoustics, theory of form (Gestalt), musicology, semiotics, and pragmatic linguistics to construct broad arguments and corroborate starting principles essential to any investigation into silence from now on. From a linguistic point of view, but with a great emphasis on sociology and the theory of integrated communication, Rosa Mateu Serra presents the relationships observed between “Silences, press and pandemic”. The author emphasizes the perpetually active semantic function of the sign of silence, which oscillates between negative and positive values but always has meaning. The relationship with the press is presented directly, through articles that explicitly talk about silence, or indirectly, offering details about loneliness, death, courtesy, or other elements traditionally linked to silence through our collective imagination. But in addition, new or more current links to silence are presen-ted, such as artistic expression, gender, or a pandemic revaluation of the importance of nonverbal communication. This article clearly shows the daily life and, at the same time, the rooting, of silence in our being and environment. With the essay “Silence and narrative photography”, using photography as an excuse, we could say, José Luís Terrón masterfully talks about elements such as silencing, the concepts of silenced (event) or silenced (image), and silence in itself, all of them terms with timely and necessary nuances for any analysis of silence in a media process. Thus, from an environment as seemingly distant from silence as photography, Terrón reinforc-es the ubiquity and synaesthesia of the phenomenon of silence. The author includes a fundamental differentiation (extensible to other media and techniques) of the relation-ships between photography and silence, distinguishing metaphors of silence, works that demand silence, those creations that radiate stillness and calm and that we assimilate as silence and, finally, and very interesting from a conceptual perspective, those works or images that incorporate silence. This article is relevant, and I would dare to say indispen-sable, for any aesthetic study of silence. For her part, Carlota Frisón explains how silence speaks to the thoughts of the creative filmmaker, specifically in film-essay. With a pertinent and well-dosed revision of the aesthetic trajectory in the appearance of sound in cinema and the subsequent considera-tion of the role of voices and silence, Frisón raises an original and unpublished point of view by granting sounds, very subjective sounds, to silence. The centrality of the idea of context as a human construction, together with a critical revision —and with a lexically rich and creative argument with documentary foundations and a brave vision— and a second axis on the idea of performing as an audiovisual expression, make this proposal a unique reflection on silence. The article opens the door to rethinking the relationship with audiovisual silence, and in fact between the whole soundtrack and silence, from the point of view of creativity and artistic expression, with an extremely innovative approach. Finally, silence researcher Ángeles Marco transfers her literary and anthropological research to the analysis of silence as expressive matter in the work of the famous director Alfred Hitchcock. In an exhaustive review of this filmmaker’s filmography, Marco reveals the use of audiovisual silence in a narrative, psychological, linguistic, and semiotic aspect. Hitchcock’s silence removes everything that is not relevant, encourages informa-tional imbalances between characters and audience interwoven with suspense, inter-venes in the assembly techniques of analysis and synthesis typical of the director, and insinuates riddles by playing with things that are not what they seem. It acts as a sign of the filmic, diegetic universe, but it also reflects a vision of the changing society of the moment, among other notable conclusions. Marco shows in detail the relevance and centrality of silence within the symbolic and creative universe of Hitchcock.It is with some pride and satisfaction that we can say that this fourth issue of the JoSSIT journal also contributes to both methodological and thematic openness in research on silence and that, in a way, the contributions in this volume are an example and a summa-ry of the latest scientific trend and curiosity surrounding this broad, complex, and exciting phenomenon. Without further ado, we hope you enjoy it.