An Arranger Can Give an Empty Bar a Job
The meaning of an absence depends on what a listener learnt to expect from the sounds around it.
Mute a pair of instruments and a voice will probably become easier to hear. It can still become harder to believe. The small impatience in a singer’s delivery may have made sense against a busy rhythmic surface. When the surface goes away, the same impatience can sound like a performance habit. The voice has been technically revealed and musically deprived of a reason for doing something. Taking away accompaniment does not necessarily remove the demands it used to place on what remains.
The arrangement has to decide what vacancy it is creating. A full section that pulls back at the end may give the listener room to hear a breath as a decisive event. A record that never had that fullness can let the same breath pass without much consequence. The density earlier in the piece is part of the force of the later space. An empty bar can acquire a character in a listener’s memory that would be invisible to a meter looking at its contents.
What the room invents
Negative space also changes who is responsible for time. If a drummer stops under a line, a voice or bass note may suddenly have to establish the shape of the phrase. If both retain the role they had while a drummer was present, the removal may reveal a useful instability. It can also expose the fact that the piece no longer has a part whose behaviour asks the listener to hold a pulse. Neither effect is automatically more intimate.
I get suspicious when sparse arrangements are used to make every song sound as if it should be granted the same kind of attention. A thick sound can be a remarkably exact way to describe confusion or safety. A lone piano can use quiet as a blanket form of prestige. In both cases the arranger still owes the listener an account of the relationship the texture is making possible. Listen for what the next sound can do because of the amount of stuff around it.
The vacancy I remember from a good recording often belongs entirely to a part that used to occupy it. There is a brief experience of hearing the missing instrument without any of the instrument’s presence. A person who has just turned the track on cannot get it in quite this way. Silence rewards the time we spent learning what to hear there. An arranger can prepare that reward with much more material than the bar itself contains.