Аннотация
It explores contemporary silence as a form of sacred, musical, and creative media through which meanings that cannot be fully articulated are made sense of. The research was carried out in 2025–2026 as a qualitative empirical study based on 60 publicly available digital artifacts selected from an initial pool of 94 items. The corpus was organized into four thematic blocks of equal size: sacred and meditative music; digital sound-art and contemporary music artifacts; online mourning and remembrance materials; and quiet digital practices, which include meditation videos, autonomous sensory meridian response content, and low-intensity listening formats. The analysis demonstrates that silence is not simply the absence of sound or speech. It must be considered as an active cultural mechanism that organizes attention, memory, affect, and modes of reception. Five main types of silence were identified: contemplative, conceptual, collective-resistant, memorial, and affective-regulatory silence. Silence has been a prime structural element in sacred and meditative music, directing the mind inward and helping to sustain spiritual focus. In sound-art and contemporary music, it functioned otherwise: it simply halted habitual expectations of performance, audibility, and listening. In online remembrance, silence remained present through broken comments, symbolic gestures, visual stillness, and kinds of memory that defied complete verbalization. The role of silence can be felt in meditation and low-intensity audio-visual practices as a means contributing to emotional calming, bodily awareness, and intimacy mediated through sound. This implies that digital platforms do not silence kill but reconfigure the cultural modes of silence through archives, interfaces, video channels, comment sections, and personalized listening environments. Silence is, therefore, proposed here as a mode of condensed communication where the unsaid gains cultural visibility within media spaces that are digitally saturated in the absence of the said.