Creating patterns with selected sound material is as simple as pushing play; fourtrack machines, inexpensive multi-track cassette recorders associated with home recording and do-it-yourself cultures of music, provide the best model of how this works. In wiki contexts, the analogy of four-track suggests an open window with four tabs. The Freesound exercises allowed us to actually and immediately resonate with what we often have to visualize: the combination of complex patterns of information as they, in Rotman's (2000) words, go parallel (p. 56). Basically, the composer working with tape produces novelty, creates new surface areas of embodiment and audience address simply by “laying down tracks” one on top of the other so that different selections of information (performances) can be heard simultaeously. In the third section of Mind and Nature, Gregory Bateson (1979) notices that "interesting phenomena occur when two or more rhythmic patterns are combined," and argues, in a sense, that the sort of beatmatching we are extracting from Aristedes' sense of chresis creates coherence. "These phenomena," which are theoretically limitless in example and type,
"illustrate very aptly the enrichment of information that occurs when one description is combined with another." Such combinations essentially yield novelty, difference, and new information. In the case of rhythmic patterns, the combination of two such patterns will generate a third. Therefore, it becomes possible to investigate an unfamiliar pattern by combining it with a known second pattern and inspecting the third pattern which they together generate" (Bateson, http://www.oikos.org/m&nmultiple.htm)
Whereas sound editors like Audacity let us focus on acts of troping and bringing sounds together, Freesound encourages the overlay of tracks that will "work on their own." Put another way, Freesound provides no effects menus, nor does it provide the control over the real-time patterning like faders and toggle switches in the turntable-mixer assemblages Grandmaster Flash, Kool Herc, and Grand Wizard Theodore designed on the technological templates coming out of Jamaican dance halls in the 1960s and 1970s. The tropological controls and functions of mixers , turtables and casssette players produces novelty, creates new surface areas of embodiment and audience address. Likewise, in wiki, by simply by “laying down tracks” one on top of the other, and then by diverse, sequenced, 'mixing' techniques, establish links and coherence (defining the space of composition, performance, and listening) so that different selections of information (performances), can, in a way be heard simultaeously
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