The Sound of Words

My Physics of Sound professor opened a lecture with the age-old question "If a tree fell in the forest and no one was there to hear it, would it still make a sound?" As a class, we came to the conclusion that no, there couldn't be a sound because there was no receiver...the 'waves' would travel through the air but without an ear drum, those 3 tiny bones and the necessary auditory nerve the 'waves' couldn't be transformed to sound. And that, like many things I have learned in my science-based classes, makes me think of art.
If someone wrote a beautiful poem but no one was there to read it, would it still be a work of art? Or, would it lack something? Rebecca Wells, the author of The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and Little Altars Everywhere, commented that a significant component of writing is actually what the reader brings to the page. Without an imagination, words on a page would be...words on a page. The reader must take these words, these descriptions of characters, setting and scene, and transform them into a type of reality. I kind of like having that privilege of being an active participant in someone's art.
And I think this can be applied to every art form, from painting to sculpting, to acting to music. Art is a two-way communication.
Aha, you say, what about if you write something and keep it to yourself? That embarassing situation you found yourself in that you only want to reveal to yourself or that wonderful comment someone made to you that made you so giddy, but you only want to keep it to yourself? How about that little cartoon you drew of the rather rude man you wish you'd never laid eyes on? If you kept it to yourself and nobody was there to receive it, would it be art?
Let's get a little Wayne Dyer here and say "If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change" and let's change the word yourself to your Self. Then you have to ask, what is your Self? If I ask my Self that question, I cannot escape the deep-seated feeling that my Self is actually part of something that exists outside of myself.
It was only after 20 years of journalling to my Self that I realized that I was actually conversing with someone/something. And so feeling this way makes me believe that everything I create is a work of art, because it is definitely received by someone/something...even before I came to realize it was happening.