Tricia Rose (1993), in Black Noise, argues persuasively that the often maligned repetition and circulation of recorded performance, the polyopia of mass-repetition, has long ago crossed a threshold from a mode of consumption to a mode of production, especially in African-American culture. Where economist Jacques Attali sees only homogenization, Rose geneologizes call-and-response and other community formation devices through their intensifications and articulations with technology, and in doing so, suggests a distributed and Dionysian vision of African-American musicking. The issue itself turns on a cut: between consumption and production. Rose interviews Sadler, Marley Marl, and cites James Brown and Parlia-funk-a-delic-ment to do crucial proleptic definitional work on the very idea of sampling, which our universities selectively define  as piracy. In the process, we get to production. This shift in register already refigures the valence of "noise."

The distinction between "noise" and "not-noise," Rose shows us, depends on the listener's capacity to respond, and bring their schema-and-projection to the ordering processes that creates rhythm. When Alain Danielou brought his energy and inquiry to sound and the perception of sound, he scanned the global rhythmic archive for the largest space of this turning-about in listening. Danielou explains that the Hindu philosophers used the term bhuta, which roughly translates as "elements" to describe the "forms of existence" in a way that directs our attention to the "subjective elements by which we construct, for want of better information, the idea which we have of the external world," not elementary matter or substance discussed in his work, The Influence of Sound Phenomena on Human Consciousnes, " (p. 1). These "spheres of perception," when organized and correlated in a once-and-for-all way with various inputs (seeing-eyes, hearing-ears, etc.), can only scratch the surface of perception's more profound potentials. But the "ether, or the the 'vibratory' state of things, represents the sphere of hearing, the most subtle since it escapes all other senses" (p. 21). Danielou's claims for sound in this issue of Psychedelic Review, published in 1967, seem to apply today to the entire spectrum of effects of our digital ecologies of information.

Indeed, Brian Rotman (2002) organizes his manuscript on the inherent participatory nature of mathematics as an inquiry into gesture precisely because "the digitalization of information is reconfiguring the major sense modalities, resturcturing the media which store control and re-present them, and overhauling the ways we perceive and respond to the body's movements by means of speech-recognition and speech-synthesis technologies and the creation of gesture-based forms of human/machine interface" (pp. 92-104). According to Danielou, "the Hindus think that if we can orient the perceptual centers, to which our sense organs

are connected, toward the internal, we can escape the limitations of these sense organs and perceive aspects of the sensible world which are deeper and larger and more profound" (Danielou, p. 20).

rhythm sciences