Delay techniques of call and response, of slowing, stretching, hurrying, cutting, or displacing tempo in performance, amplify emotions and allow flexibility of participation. Delay technqiues priveledge affect, a necessary ingredient for growing and sustaining any ecology that seeks to collectively focus attention and will on possible futures. Special "effects" are noisy, and yet create the conditions for connections and the entrainment of a commons.

In Coltrane's ensembles, counterpoint and counterbalance opens up a compositional space that makes "longer wavelengths" or different orders of pattern available to the musicians, creating a dynamic but common surface. In "My Favorite Things," rythmic displacement takes the form of delay.

Call and response is the iconic exemplar of delay technology. Allows interference patterns, standing waves, evolutionary feedback, hierarchies of information, and novelty. As a technique of call and response, delay depends on laya.

Kofsky's play-by-play of rhythmic displacement in the classic quartet when Coltrane begins to solo on "My Favorite Things":

"Tyner greets Coltrane's entrance by stating the vamp with greater force, and Jone's reaction to this heightened emphasis...is as radical as it is devastating: to counterbalance Tyner's stronger assertion of the initial downbeat--to "respond," as it were, to the "call" of the piano's chord on the opening beat of the first measure--Jones delays his bass drum accents until the second beat of the measure"

In Coltrane's ensembles, the alternations between composing and reposing (delaying) create fine-tuned capacities for response. What determines the tempo, or laya, of our rhetorical choices, which, cyclically, tells participants when to listen, where to listen, and for how long, and, then, again, what and how to select? Rowell (1979) suggests that in Indian literature, cosmogenies often proceed in cycles: primal matter is split and differentiated, and, after distribution and arrangement, is maintaned or held open in ordered time, then melted, or dissolved back into matter. “Kala is connected with the first phase by its function as that which divides,” or cuts, “Kala is similarly connected with the second phase, that of motion maintained” or held in balanced equipoise (samya) “in ordered time; and laya,” the space between the beats, the rests that determine the tempo and leave a sequence open for interuption, collaboration, and transformation through rhythm, involves “the dissolution back into elemental matter” (p. 100). For millenia and worldwide, formulations akin to Kalā-Kāla-Laya has guided rhythmic arts in sound and dance. Coltrane's music compresses this rhythmic compound and pushes it farther and farther from equilibrium.

A sustained engagement with Coltrane's music, a model of rhythmic entrainment and music-as-filter, the ability to distribute the complex interiority produced by dense information flows (in/out, open/close ) would seem to produce what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin has called a "crisis" of "psychic decomposition." (Future of Man, p.139). However, Coltrane's sonic yoga prescribes a dissipation of ego that has always been a dissolving, not into nihilism, but into a commons. Therefore, as Teillhard de Chardin reminds us, so-called ego-loss, "provided it be accompanied by a revival of the phyletic sense" is in fact the "true instrument" for the "collectivisation of Earth" (Future of Man,p.141).

Delay is a time-based figure, having to do with the movement of energy within and between systems. Movement is created and sustained by working and writing in rhythm—that is to say, together. Erwin Schrodinger taught us about how standing waves are electrons connected by nodes, which led Max Born to conclude that these standing wave forms are probabilities The art of rhetoric, which traffics in probabilities, not certainties, approximates a science of rhythm at this scale and resolution (Dancing Wu Li Masters 122-28. For rhetoric agents either on the move or dwelling in uncertainty, rhetoric becomes an art of interrupting each other; knowing when to cut in on a developing sequence, and how to detach from a deeply felt major premise when another premise arrives unexpectedly, with a clang. Music and sound has always taught us ways to organize and share the real dissonance that we call "emotional states," and I suspect we have much more to learn.

In “Order from Rhythmic Entrainment and the Origin of Levels Through Dissipation” philosopher John Collier and musician Mark Burch introduce rhythmic entrainment to describe the emergence of regular, predictable patterns within or between systems. Rhythmic entrainment realizes symmetries of information by means of sharing, but the production of information also manifests in moments of symmetry breaking. Collier and Burch offer this perspective to researchers in physics, chemistry, biology, measurement and communication, which suggests uses for writing instruction. Today, writers work with information so dense and ongoing in its generation and transformation that mathematical models of information production apply in everyday writing. When writing becomes a practice of creating and breaking links, a lot of noise gets mixed into the signal, and we find ourselves immersed in a kairotic space-time comprised of information, where "not just meaningful distinctions," but "any distinctions" take hold (Collier & Burch, 1998, p.2). Crucially, asignification and affect become important dimensions of community formation through writing. Democritus, Lucretius, Aristoxenus, Plato, Liebniz, Freidrich Nietzche, Sun Ra, John Coltrane, and inumerable physicisists and logicians have closely queried the infinitessimally small cuts and perferations that we feel so strongly in the discontinuous digitality of rhetorical practice today, which unfolds in what Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck name an “attention economy” (Davenport & Beck, 2001). How are we to get a handle on redunctionist dimension digital rhetoric? Collier and Burch (1998) provide a clue. “The result of rhythmic entrainment is a simplification of the entrained system,” and this helps make sense of abundant and dynamic information because “the information required to describe it is reduced. Entrainment can be communicated, passing information from one system to another.” Crucially, “the paradigm is a group of jazz percussionists agreeing on a complex musical progression” (Collier & Burch, p. 1). This musical treatment of information bringing patterns into awareness, and makes this awareness of hierarchies of order shareable. As communications ecologies intensify, we can consult the intensities of free jazz for insight into the transition from communication to commons-formation that a paradigm of planetary "consciousness sharing" is bringing into being.

Infodynamics of Sound