Personally, I prefer the BBC Symphony Orchestra's version of John Cage's 4'33", but I am getting the surviving member of The Beatles and The Who together for a rousing rendition of this classic tune.
Since Danny posted this story, I came acoss a brief article on "silence" per se, in connection with this piece of "music", which pointed out that we don't know what silence is, because even in relative silence, we hear our own pulse, blood circulating in our ears etc.
Almost a case of beware of what you wish for, you may get it...
Nuts. Just go to the public library and (hopefully) hear a live performance for free, as long as you like
Reminds me of a story a software engineer working on sound cards once told me, his team thought they'd cleverly come across a way to save reduce the size of audio files by saving silent bits by indicating length of silence, instead of saving the usual periodic samples (which would of course all say the same thing). Turns out the method was already patented (which they didn't know at the time), so their company had to fork over royalties for using the method.