Loris Gréaud asked Lee Ranaldo, the famous guitarist of Sonic Youth not to play, but to ‘think’ about, his favorite guitar solo. Lee thought about it to himself for about 35 minutes in an anechoic chamber at the IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Accoustique/Musique), Paris, and Gréaud recorded this ‘silence’ picked up by a microphone after carefully determining the range of frequency that the microphone could capture. Gréaud also took pictures of Ranaldo while the guitarist was deep in thought. Considering Gréaud’s constant interest in music, Think Loud could be regarded as homage to John Cage’s 4′ 33″ (1952). While Cage incorporated the element of chance in his music by filling the space with the noise of the audience instead of playing the piano, Gréaud technically reduced noise and provided absolute silence to the listeners, emphasizing the conceptual aspect of sound. By contrasting absolute silence in an anechoic chamber with music played in the musician’s mind, Gréaud leads us to think about how music can exist without musical scores and performances.
