Shadows of the Void

The lack of 0, or absence of void is one of the essential characteristics of early western thinking. Ancient Greeks did not have 0 (Vedral, 2018, p. 32), and it is also absent in Roman numeralsRoman numerals. However, the Arabic numeralsArabic numerals contain 0 as one of their fundamentals. 0 came to the Arabic numeric system from India and Persia, and this crucial difference between Arabic (Eastern) and Roman (Western) numerals also somehow displays the different civilisational aspects of the Eastern and Western worlds at that time. In a number of my own musical works (starting from 2011) the silence in music is treated as 0 in mathematics and the void in physical space. In my book Mathematics and Contemporary Music (2013, p. 12), I discovered the following metaphorical correlation: Silence—0—Void.