I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a

dancing star. I tell you: ye have still chaos in you.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

Noise—whether felt generally as "controversy," registering specifically as a perceived dissonance produced by cultural difference, or deployed scientifically to describe rampant and generative complexity and/or redundancy in information--is a trope and commonplace of dynamic and increasingly interconnective media, and because this stochastic vector/feature extends through technological innovations and the practices that support and evolve them. In this sense, noise defines the scene of writing today, especially if we understand writing today as a social experience. One way to consider this social/technological noise vector is to amplify and encourage the different dimensonions of dissonance that practices of linking in wikis (figured below as potential spatial/analytical analogues to musical/rhythmic practice and stochastic processes in biology) amplify in their use.

In an article published in Diseases of the Nervous System, Roland Fischer (1969) points out that with Descartes and rationality, consciousness came to mean "to know in oneself, alone" and lost the sense of "knowing with," which is to say the sense of "sharing knowledge with one another"("The Perception-Hallucination Continuum" p. 163). Music has always necessarily mined this irrationally inflected sense of " knowing with" which will greatly inflect both technoculture and technologicial development in the 21st century, and so research in composition must inquire into the ways musical practice informs distributed and interactive compositional strategies common to diverse communities--some, steeped in remix culture, others, in scientific inquiry/technological development, still others in political and economic processes. All conduct inquiry and share projects in an increasingly messy mesh. More than chaos to be ordered, noise introduces a necessary complexity as it opens new pathways and bounces writers "out of the box" and into the rhythmic between-space where interaction, collaboration and transformation can take place.

While I do approach and participate in these problems and dynamics as a teacher, I also draw on my experience as an active "noisician." Sampling from experience gained in collaborative experiments in sound, especially those conducted with an improvistational "noiseband" in the 90s (Meringue) and with a guerilla streettheatre multimedia collective while in graduate school (Peacefeather/Order of the Silver Cosmonauts), I have found that a mixture of "uncomposed sound" and controversy can increase the "fluctuation increasing" responses required for writing together, with students across analog and digital media. For a teacher of writing, "modelling" noise and forming "bands" with students requires that the teacher develop a capacity to be taught. Then, classroom-based rhetorical communities can, like biological and mechanical symmetries, form in a musical way. Nils L. Wallen's (1991) book, Biomusicology, builds a working definition of music resonates with cybernetic definitions of the dynamics of information. Rhetoric and composition has been more interested in assessing how student writers cultivate "preserving" or "fluctuation controlling processes" of writing. And this is perhaps partly because classroom space works as a site of fluctuation control. If classrooms can also be thought of as a "subsystem" of a larger ecology then they are far too often the subsystem that is not open to the set of processes that increases fluctuation in feedback loops. When we say "open-sourcing" the writing classroom, we are interested in the possibility of cultivating group-composed, dynamic, open-ended project spaces that emerge as "dissipative structures," patterns that emerge to order the disorder and chaos that is elemental to openended creative production. In wikis tuned, by means of linking-based assignments, for interactivity, students perform "evolutionary" writing, where they participate in "fluctuation increasing processes" and fashion principles of coherence as well. A balance of what Edward De Bono (1969) calls depatterning and patterning tools and then intervene on the autopoesis and strategies of "self-enhancement" that sometimes propogate in multimedia contexts, including and perhaps especially in courses populated by extremely brilliant students. Here, as with music, principles of nesting train participants in the subtleties of time and timing.

"Music," Wallen argues, "is an open system of evolving structures growing into sound artifacts which not only consume actual time but generate virtual time; the system and its space-time structures are ultimately conditioned by bio-geocultural parameters of behavior and deportment....music relies upon a superior feedback loop compounded by three subsystems:

(a) the auditory system as integrated in the complex brain circuit: sub-system1 (SS1);

(b) the sounding structures of the artifact as analogue to living organisms: subsystem 2 (SS2); and

(c) the space-time environment: sub-system 3 (SS3).

The superior feedback loop alternates, like the subsystems, between positive (fluctuation increasing=evolutionary), and negative (fluctuation controlling=preserving) processes; they are, by defintion, open, comparable or analogous to a dissipative structure." (Wallen, pp. 16-17). To elaborate further on the language of dynamic "sound artifacts," Wallen refers to the ordering effectuated by dissipative structures. Wallen relies on Erich Jantsch (1976), whose article "SelfRealization through Self-Transcendence" characterizes dissipative structures as systems that come about as adaptive processes

Of course, the analog synthesizer provides a powerful musical model for the attractor states of thermodynamics.

Pauline Oliveros, in an interview with Trevor Pinch (2003) reports that turning the oscillators on her Buchla synthesizers into a delay technology, in her practice, created a time and space for her to respond to and work with her medium (sound) in "real time." Oliveros explains, I devised my own way of using these oscillators....I wanted a way to be able to perform, to work in real time with sound because I wasn't patient enough to make all those splices and wait to see if I got it right! So, I used tape delay. I set the oscillators at super audio, above hearing, and generated difference tones....heterodyning putting the two frequencies together to produce a beat frequency....The dials on those generators, they were very large...but with difference tones you could make very minute changes of the dial and sweep the whole audio range. (Pinch, p. 160)

Oliveros “produced sonic compositions by cobbling together by cobbling together the center's unused electronic equipment: sine tone and square wave generators connected to an organ keyboard, amplifiers, a mixer, a Hammond spring-type reverb, stereo tape recorders, a turntable with record, and two tape recorders in a delay setup" (Pinch, p. 160). All of these resonance technologies push compositional practice further into exogeneity, where the body remains a part of the shared space of composing, performing, and listening, even as the resonance compresses and distributes information with an "efficiency" unique to the medium of sound. Oliveros' practice shows us how to "repatch" deferrals of time-based information flows. In a similar manner, scratching a record also intervenes on time, and promote rhythmic effects.

Infodynamics of Sound