A category-theoretic approach to modeling John Cage's Silent piece

Abstract: We derive a schema of John Cage's meta-work the Silent piece from his compositions 4'33'', 0'00''(4'33'' No. 2), and One3, using the mathematics of category theory within Spivak and Kent's (2012) framework of ontological logs for knowledge representation. A category presentation A of a database that describes an instance of 4'33'' from its premiere in 1952 is translated via two functors into the category presentations B (0'00'') and C (One3). A pushout of B and C along A allows for the presentation of the category S (the meta-work the Silent piece), and a discussion of the category's S-specification and fiber order. Finally, we derive a semantics from the fiber in order to reason on persistent spatio-temporal structures of Cage's Silent piece.