"Maskull listened entranced, yet agitated. The song, if it might be termed song, seemed to be always just on the point of becoming clear and intelligible—not with the intelligibility of words, but in the way one sympathises with another's moods and feelings; and Maskull felt that something important was about to be uttered, which would explain all that had gone before. But it was invariably postponed, he never understood—and yet somehow he did understand.

Late in the afternoon they came to a clearing, and there Panawe ceased his recitative. He slowed his pace and stopped, in the fashion of a man who wishes to convey that he intends to go no farther.

"What is the name of this country?" asked Maskull.

"It is the Lusion Plain."

"Was that music in the nature of a temptation—do you wish me not to go on?"

"Your work lies before you, and not behind you."

"What was it, then? What work do you allude to?"

"It must have seemed like something to you, Maskull."

"It seemed like Shaping music to me."

The instant he had absently uttered these words, Maskull wondered why he had done so, as they now appeared meaningless to him.

Panawe, however, showed no surprise. "Shaping you will find everywhere."

"Am I dreaming, or awake?"

"You are awake."

-A Voyage to Arcturus, by David Lindsay

Contemporary studies of information storage and flows show that print, film, magnetic and optical information grow exponentially each year. Quotidian existence for agents immersed in and focusing attention through these media necessarily undergoes an ecosystemic turn, and involves a far-from-equilibrium dynamic of information production and dissipation, an interconnected context where timing is everything.

Musical tools of composition have been around for a long time, and pop songs, commercial jingles, and hollywood soundtracks barely scratch the surface of the global historical musical bandwidth. Recently, analog and digital tools for selecting, combining, tuning, and rendering media have made (formerly) strictly musical templates widely available.

Commerical delay technologies that let performers alter the level, number of repetitions, the timing, and mode of sequencing of any sound by simply turning knobs show how the fundamental gaps that define a delayed signal (echoed, flanged, or phased so as to forestall the return of a particular set of frequencies) work on many scales and are built into the routines and gestures of writing. Digitech and other companies collate these potentials into cheap “stomp boxes” that are like technological equivalents to the cheap “am radio” consciousness that adds to the ambience of the commons. By analogy to the patterns available for free (Kauffman's "order for free") on the web, these technologies are "leaky" and connected to multiple and diverse practices of production, suggesting pedagogical uses for simple softwares such as wiki. Sound recording and editing technologies offer much interactive potential, and, as the web continues to evolve, will become essential for teaching with technology. Delay technologies, in particular, remind us to consider rhythm as an organizing principle of networks and their entrainment.

Delay is often taken to imply and used to designate inefficient lag, and procrastination. In these cases, delay tactics get a bad rap. In musical practice, however, delay is axiomatic. (insert music-as-filter, here). Delay also intervenes on time in a way that allows rhythm to instruct us, and enjoin us, to alternately follow and kindle patterns of organic energy, to bear witness, to transform. In communication, our capacity to dissipate is as important as our ability to debate. Our communicative response-ability is tuned up as we tune down to a listening mode: delay modifications of a rhetorical space can produce a particularly productive stochasticism, a sort of stuttering that allows counterarguments (coefficients of difference) to coexist/overlay, and be heard.

Theoretical biologist Stanley Salthe theorizes a crucial role for delay in the production, description, and measurement of information in far-from-equilibrium systems. Salthe develops a particular definition of information as a measure of exergy. "Information is any configuration that might have been different, providing that it delays energy dissipation so that the energy is dissipated more completely" (2003). This paper/webtext further defines and expands upon this infodynamic understanding of delay in creative practices that mine the sonic register of information. Tropes of sonic delay--such as the jazz soloist's iterative gestures of restraint at the edge of a refrain, or the recursive tablist's alternations between striking or holding a beat--can simplify staggering complexities into information-rich "time frames" in dynamic contexts.

The rhythmic gestures of beat matching common to dj culture, tape collage, percussion in Hindustani classical music; the oratorical dexterity of rap and skaldic, and the attention-splitting essential to heterodyning high frequencies with analog circuits--these practices all depend on similar delay techniques.

While such delay techniques of information management mark the time for individual practitioners, they also chart the shift of perception towards a collective substratum of creative practice.This section surveys analog and digital delay instruments and electronics, offers an interactive exercise that demonstrates techniques of aural delay, and connects their emergence with the intensification of awareness and development of collective experience that Vladimir Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin dubbed the noosphere.