Music and Time Annotation << Back Shauna Jean Doherty Noise and Silence: The Contemporary Sound Sculptures of Adam Basanta A.N. Lipov This translated scholarly article examines the radical and destabilizing potential of noise and silence as expressed in the sound sculpture practice of Canadian artist Adam Basanta. The author's analysis is conducted by comparing Basanta's work with that of sound sculpture founders John Cage and Steve Reich, as well as contemporary sound sculpture practitioners Robert Pugliese, Konrad Smolenski, Michael Sailstorfer, and Nikita Gale, whose works utilize the simultaneously liberating and oppressive aspects of noise, as well as the calming and overwhelming qualities of silence, through which the compositional potential of these opposites is revealed. Adam Basanta's compositions (both material and sound) have a resonance that subverts the fundamental principles of acoustics: his works see sound, create silence and fi nd melody in hum. By creating sculptures that oscillate between the absence and presence of sound, Basanta refl ects on a contemporary world fi lled with noise and proposes strategies of feedback and silence as methods to counteract the deafening modern landscape. Through this technical subtlety, his sound systems intervene in the social, material and spatial processes inherent in auditory perception. The paper focuses on the fact that the dynamic between noise and silence on which the artist relies so heavily draws its conceptual power from John Cage's legacy – the composition “4'33”, fi rst performed by David Tudor in 1952. which brought composers' attention to the rhetorical and discursive aspects of silence, and Cage's experiments as a conceptual artist, which demanded renewed approaches to listening and formed a new vision in rethinking the acoustics and mechanics of sound. Keywords: noise and silence¸ Adam Basanta, John Cage, “4'33”. DOI: 10.25791/music.9.2025.1375 Pp. 16-21.