Let's compose with sound--all we need is a web browser and an internet connection. Along the way, we will write in wiki.

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

poltergeist, from the German poltern + Geist, meaning "noisy ghost"

25th anniversary screening in Pinellas Park on October 4th

Avital Ronell, in Dictations, reads Johann Peter Eckermann's recounting of his conversations with Goethe, arguing that Goethe "haunted" his young friend and medium. At once: Eckermann's books are by Goethe, Eckermann is another Goethe creation. Weird!

Palaung shamans in Thailand and Myanmar use music and make offerings of betal and tobacco to spirits, or Nats, at weddings, births and funerals. Phonographer Aaron Ximm uploaded this field recording, made in Burma, of a Nat ceremony to the soundtransit database] Listen in! Imagine how you might describe cellular phones to a Nat, or one of your ancestors; perhaps imagine how you would define your cell phone if your great-great grandmother happened to "call" on you. "Oh, this thing," as you flip open your hand-held conversation interrupter. "Of all the ubiquitous technological familiars that emerged after the microprocessor made digital computing widely available, the mobile phone is the most...." Wait, wait, wait and hold up a second, your great-great grandmother says, interrupting and delaying your definition. Your dictation is now demanding all your attention, the entire frequency domain of all your communication channels; even the very statistical multiplexing technology that manages bandwidth into arbitrary and variable bit-rate digital channels so that our cell phones can in fact always be "on call" to make that instantaneous connection is now jammed, also haunted. You are the medium, and the message says

Alexander Graham Bell's design sketches for the telephone from the Bell Family Papers archives.

Heed the call! But first consider a more particularly "telephonic" concept that threads throughout another of Avital Ronell's (1989) books, The Telephone Book. "Telephonics imposes the recognition of a certain irreducible presence of the other with respect to the self" (p. 82). Ronell asks, "to what degree has the Other become a technologized command post, perhaps even a recording?" (p. 82, emphasis added). Ronell's "telephonics" describes ways that communication technologies expand common surface area: more contact. But this does not imply stability. Ronell's Telephone Book opens with a "User's Manual" that warns: "Dealing with a logic and topos of the switchboard, (telephonics) engages the destabilization of the addressee" (p. 1). This destabilization has only amplified into a synaesthesia of reading and writing that many now call multimedia composition. Not so long ago, Ronell placed the call for an utterly sonic approach which precisely anticipates the destabilization, effective redundancy and distributed-ness that simple, "stupid" softwares for connectivity like wiki—which means “to hasten” in Hawaiin—make available for a much wider range of coding regimes than just binary code. Ronell's "telephonics" affirms the axiomatic nature of noise in this technological, social, and political intensification of consciousness, and of presence:

Using swatches of uncomposed sound from the freesound project, the http://soundtransit.nl/index.html soundtransit] community, or any sound source that can be linked to our wiki, we can play wiki as an instrument for finding new rhythms in the chaos and complexity endemic to multimedia. Bell and Watson's "harmonic telegraph,” which allowed more than one signal at time to travel a single telegraph line, is part of the story of how we learned to mix visual, sonic, and logos-based information on one platform.

Now let's compose with sound as a way help each of us articulate a particular definition of "cell phone."

It's true that writing takes work, but writing together requires play, so as you play around at the freesound and soundtransit sites, you might consider how interaction itself creates diverse distinctions between organized sound and noise, and between our ideas about the freedoms and restrictions bound up in mobile phones. To explore these matters first-hand, listen to each other's freesound compositions (instructions, below), and add layers of sounds in response. While you listen, write. Actively making noise, and even music, will help us focus our collective attention on important steps in collaborative rhetorical processes and teach us the art of premise-matching. All you'll need is an internet connection and a web browser.

Step 1

1 Sequencing and layering sound can alter how you feel and where you focus your mind. Go to the freesound site first. Freesound makes it easy for anyone to play around with and layer different sounds. Using a tabbed browser, you can play and loop different sounds in different tabs in the same browser window. Record your composition. This is easy: create a wiki space for your composition, name your mix, and list the freesound or soundtransit urls. At this stage, you might want to blog a bit about the recording process. Think like a composer: listen to the layers of sounds you've selected, and tell us (performers, listeners, and fellow composers) about them (give us directives, or write out liner notes, or simply share associational thoughts, etc). You may be compelled to place images, links, and previously composed text on this page, as well. Upload. Now, we can all open the tabs you selected and concatenated, and in doing so, read and listen to your composition.

Step 2

a. Listen to your classmate's compositions. Add at least two freesounds to three different compositions; or, you may even want to subtract a sound or two from the original you are remixing. Try playing 2 compositions at the same time--mash them up As you do, consider 2 different definitions of cell phone and phone culture. Describe the effect of the composition before and after your additions. What do your additions and/or subtractions do? Do they amplify the effects of the composition as you found it? Reverse them? Did your changes simplify or add complexity?

b. Listen again to your classmate's compositions. Post your two favorite compositions to your blog. What effect does the music seem to induce in listeners? Finally, write a couple hundred words about mobile phones and/or magic and/or rhetoric and post to your blog.

Free your sounds and your mind will follow!

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