While jukeboxes and records are the foundation of this day, and they’ve mostly died out, the spirit of National Silent Record Week continues on!
How to Celebrate National Silent Record Week
Looking for ideas on making a meaningful time out of National Silent Record Week? Check out a couple of these ideas to get started with:
Enjoy Some Silence
The essence behind National Silent Record Day is to get away from the hubbub and noise from the end of the year parties and start the new year off by keeping things a bit quieter.
Consider ways this might be done at home with noise-canceling headphones, getting out into the woods where it’s quiet, spending some time meditating or practicing some other form of silent living.
Perhaps this would be a great way to start the year and then carry the practice out into future months.
Check Out Other Silent Record Tracks
The founders of National Silent Record Week are not the only ones who have put silent tracks on their recordings to make a statement. Others might have put songs after a time of silence, considered to be a “bonus” or “hidden” track.
Take a look at a few of these well-known silent tracks:
- John Lennon’s “Nutopian International Anthem” was a 3 minute silent track on the 1973 album Mind Games
- The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan was an entire silent record released by Stiff Records in the UK in 1980
- John Cage’s album from 1952 included a track called 4’33” where the only sounds were the opening and closing of the piano at the beginning and the end, while the other 4 1/2 minutes were silent
- Vulfpeck, an American funk band, released an album called Sleepify in 2014, which included ten full tracks of silence each lasting about 30 seconds
History of National Silent Record Week
Silent Record Week has a history that dates back to 1959, getting its start on a college campus in Detroit, Michigan. It seems that during this time, some of the folks at the University of Detroit thought it would be a good idea to replace some of the noisy rock-n-roll records in the jukebox with records that were simply silent.
The idea was that a person in a restaurant or other public place would pay their nickel to get song’s worth of complete silence. This was particularly enjoyable during the first week of the year, following the noisy holiday season!
Silent Record Week became so popular with the students in Detroit that it led to the idea of forming a record label that produced only silent records. And the following year, in 1960, the first official National Silent Record Week was celebrated.
The event got so much traction that, that first year, the entire chorus of the University of Detroit appeared at a concert where they did not actually sing.
Now it is celebrated annually as a reminder for everyone to get creative about ways to incorporate quiet into their lives, during this week and throughout the year.
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