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matter are solely painting, with no extraneous pictori-

al elements. Rauschenberg, however, had a different

way of thinking about it. “A canvas is never empty,”

he said. Cage took Rauschenberg’s words to heart.

Cage remarked that Rauschenberg’s all-white paint-

ings were “airports for light, shadows, and particles.”

Cage’s second insight came when he visited an

anechoic chamber at Harvard University. An anechoic

chamber is a room designed to maximally absorb

sound and attenuate echoes. Once inside the chamber

Cage thought he would find absolute silence. Instead

he heard two persistent sounds. One was high pitched,

the other low. He asked the attending acoustical

engineer what they were. According to Cage, the

engineer explained that the high tone was his nervous

system and the low tone was the blood circulating

through his veins and arteries. (Scientifically speaking,

humans cannot directly hear the sound of their nervous

systems, no matter how quiet the environment. The

nervous-system sound Cage thought he heard was