composer Tigran Mansurian on sound and silence

For example, I’ve happened to overhear two people having a tense conversation in the silence of the night under my window. I was unable to understand a word from their dialogue; the subject of their argument was unintelligible. But the sounds they produced (whispered, at times) lent themselves wonderfully to the silence, sometimes breaking out of that silence in short bursts. I listened with delight to their unintelligible conversation, imbued with eccentricities, paradox and absurdity—a conversation that had more depth and content than if I were able to follow its verbal content. The sounds lacked semantic detail and, through the power of their abstraction, were disposed to becoming signs—signs of midnight conversation and fury.