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“4’33” is a three-movement composition by American composer John Cage. It consists of four minutes, thirty-three seconds of silence and whatever sound the audience happens to make during the duration of its performance. As such, for three minutes and thirty-three seconds, the following human tics, gestures, and utterances are magically metamorphosed into incantatory music: heavy breaths, coughs, sneezes, sighs, slurps, belches, farts, yawns, scratches, nose-picks, hair-slicks, scalp-rubs, knuckle-crunches, neck cracks, chair squeaks, change-jingles, teeth grinding, picking of scabs, pulling of cuticles, exasperated sputtering, manic fidgeting, gasping guffaws, guffawing gasps, lips smacking, slow-pleading smiles, muffled sobs, the occasional rhapsodic scream, and the dubious, unrelentingly slow crinkling of assorted candies and various provisions culled from the bottom of one oversized, antediluvian purse like a fistful of shiny doubloons wrested up from some ancient seabed.

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