CINEMA Music is perhaps the most highly developed sensate function of human understanding. One can begin to speak of the aesthetics of sound only in relation to music, because it is this that provides the most fundamental expression of the states of being and of acting in a continuously impinging disorder. It is possible to read speech, to make sense of words one has never heard, as signs that refer to a content for a state of being or of action. As for incidental and atmospheric sounds in the cinema, they lie between The organised sounds (music) drifting into entropy and Contextual Sounds (speech) The rest is silence. Yet silence, from which everything was originally supposed to begin, does not exist in an absolute sense. 'The soundtrack invented silence' says Robert Bresson, and this is perhaps true in a far deeper sense than even he meant it. On the most obvious level, silence in music relates to space indirectly. In the cinema, on the other hand, it relates to space in movement. In music, it relates to the sustaining of a note, to reverberation, to absorption by the spatial enclosures, producing, transmitting, reflecting, and receiving the sound. In the cinema all this and more. In fact, cinema may or may not relate to the spaces which produce and receive sound. It is the arbitrariness of silence, created both by the sounds, the music, the speech and its juxtaposition with the visual imagery, changing in tone, line and colour that articulates silence further. For this perhaps a reference-point could be the discontinuites of sound in the scene where the heroine of Subamarekha kills herself off-screen. Neither the spoken word nor music can work in such discontinuity. The smallest unit of the spoken word in any language is the allophone. In specific languages, it is the specific manner of continuously linking ofallophones that constitutes a word or even a nonsense syllable. An isolated note cannot be perceived as music. If it is held for very long it may not be perceived at all. An isolated note is no different in meaning and perception than what we have just cited as an example of discrete sounds m silence. ^Q October-December 1983