All the Silence, 2022

20 hours, 2 minutes, 42 seconds
digitally generated and processed audio

This conceptual audio work was created by scanning in every page of a 1929 edition of Webster’s dictionary. The artist then used Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to convert the images into a machine-readable text. He had his computer read the entire dictionary, resulting in a audio file over 100 hours long. He then used digital audio filters to remove all the words from the audio, resulting in the audio of the spaces between words.

Audio Sample
Joel Swanson