discreet music diagram, Brian Eno

Brian Eno's signal-flow diagram narrates the modifications he makes, using tape technology, of found and carefully selected sounds. This "troping" of sound is akin to the treatments we bring to bear on language when we take the time to reflect on the ideas , poems, arguments, and stories we deem important, and then proceed to deliberately revise and remix them with a particular person or group of people in mind.

Listening in noisy contexts--would this mean focusing in on one element, and filtering out all other stimuli? Or would it require a sort of detachment, an ability to sit still and resonate with the overall timbre of the local environment? Jean Luc Nancy, in Listening, argues that "timbre is not a single datum," and from this we can understand timbre to be the "first correlative of listening" (40-1).

Gestures of delay provide the means to create morphologies of timbre, but more importantly, delay makes room to transformatively engage the dissipation of patterns in our next moves; and so, our "just-in-time" response-ability is tuned up as we tune down to a mode of listening solicited by delay patterns, which build infinite variations on basic echo "locations." The delay modifications of a densely interconnected rhetorical space initiate stochastic processes, promoting the vocalization of counterarguments (the very coefficients of slight difference that delay patterns seem to chart), so that they may be heard, and so that they may coexist, and even overlay into new patterns, Shannon's "surprise value" of information. Even though the "noisy," stochastic time-space we create when we use prolepsis (anticipation) and delay (hesitation) to find each other's sequences would seem to "alienate" us from each other, these practices continue to "jiggle" the connections, create the "weak links" essential to premise-matching and pattern sharing, and the aleatory drift that Lyotard in his essay "Several Silences," where structural and perceptual understandings of music come together in the figure of filter--music as filter for flows of energy. This diagram of music includes our bodies. Most neuroscientists will agree with Hans Christian von Baeyer (2004) when he argues that stochastic resonance plays a functional and indispensible role in our ability to become aroused, and to muster and allocate attention (p. 126 ff). Resonance technologies allow both hesistation mantras and anticipation mantras to constantly comingle with unpredictable results, even though these basic and acoustically palpable sample-and-hold durations, enabled by delay at its limit (where it merges with click-tracks and other "on the one" strategies of community formation), are basically predictable and repeatable gestures. As such they become part of the pattern-sharing dance especially in small clusters of writers, whether they be Coltrane's quartet or a group of students researching alternative solutions to a real-world problem.

Delay, in other words, intervenes on habit structures in "almost real time," as Pauline Oliveros would say. Quintilian, for this same reason, valued the declamation exercises above all other rhetorical exercises. Delay, then suspends response at the kinematic level that Donald describes in his chapter on the "first hybrid mind," in just-in-time/space of gesture where "working memory, attention, and explicit recall are combined into a review routine that can evaluate the success of a self-initiated action in context, and modify it accordingly.....the most compelling example of this ability is our unique sensitivity to rhythm" (A Mind So Rare 272). Rich Doyle (2008), in his forthcoming book Ecodelic, describes the suspension of observation that Huxley reports in his mescaline writings, providing a precise illustration of how noise, in this case, the depatterning effectuated by a plant adjunct, creates the conditions for a delay phenomenology. This suspension or delay, at the kinematic register described by Donald (awareness of rhythm, "the first hybrid mind"), takes place in an n-dimensional cartography of links (the forging of connections and the blockages of connections: rhythm). Coltrane's recordings, Jantsch's descriptions of evolutionary feedback, and Govinda's rhetoric (in the handbook sense) become guides for navigating the topologies of Commons space, and, taken as "guides" become open to configuration and consultation as rhetors once refered to Quinitilian's work, which bundled the findings of long traditions for new "platforms" and contexts of his historical moment.

Delay causes time-slips, and so instantiates a focus on the nonlinear space where linking can happen, and distributed productivity can emerge. Doyle explains that when a subject in Heinrich Kluver's mescaline studies of the 1920s discovered that he and his friend, "Nissel" are indeed inseperable, part of the same "fretwork," he is fact "recapitulates Tat tvam Asi, an ecosystemic reality principle from the Upanishads that renders the separation of world and self into the optical and topological illusion that it is....the interactivity of the fretwork seemingly induced by writing on mescaline suggests that the forms sought by Kluver as "constants" are navigational aids for a non local psyche, 'Nissel as I.'"(Doyle, Ecodelic) First, "non verifiable information" learning to inhabit ecologies saturated in non verifiable information requires practices that the writing "I" both compresses response-time to the kinematic register described by Merlin Donald in A Mind So Rare'', and, at the same time, creates delay ontologies of recursive patterning, where, as Donald explains, humans can share attention/perception/memory space. In this interactive space, humans evolved pre-linguistic practices and developed "complex repertoire" and this repertoire of gestures "will regulate shared attention." The most crucial point Donald makes concerns the necessity of clustering over fine-tuning commas into place. Because"these patterns of behavior are transmitted across cultural generations by repeating the same basic sequences in the context of a pedagogy," we must continue to find ways to play together in our compositional practices of teaching and learning (Donald 255, emphasis added).