What is writing with sound? Traditionally, questions of writing have taken us back to the Greek archive. Aristoxenus and Aristides provide some rhetorics of rhythm. But the writing subject working with sound today is a distributed formation, and appears as swarm, a choir, a dance troupe. Today's "remix culture" most obviously calls for more inquiry into diverse archives of rhythmic practices rooted in sound: the techne of call and response, sampling, blues traditions, and african american commons practice share the same building blocks, sampling and repetition. We also can look to the North Indian Hindustani traditions of raga and tala for practices and theories of sound, time, and rhythmic composition rooted in core tropes of lepsis and repetitio, and to the concept of akasa.

Author Alain Danielou concludes his study of the effects of sound phenomena on human consciousness with a meditation on the perceptual effects of selection processes and the conditioning effects of repetition on mind and body: "The mechanism of auditory perception and of the analytic mental perception which corresponds to it, permits sounds to act through repetition upon our internal personality, to transform our sensibility, our way of thinking, the state of our soul, and even our moral character."

Danielou connects this art of perception to music's cousin, number.

" This is true of music, where arithmetic (or rather, harmonic) frequency ratios, based on the combination of certain specific numbers, which our mental mechanism permits us to recognize and to analyze, produce considerable effects on our psycho-physiological condition."

And language, even: "This is also true, although less directly, for language, where the repetition of certain syllables corresponding to specific ideas, produces a mental conditioning utilized as one of the fundamental methods of yoga" ("The Influence of Sound Phenomena of Human Consciousness" page 26 in the Psychedelic Review)

Working with Ksemaraja's Commentaries on the Shiva Sutra Vimarshini, via a French translation, Danielou renders what sounds like early description of the rhythmicity and productivity that discontinuity brings to digital ontologies today. "The bindu, wanting to manifest the thought it has of all things, vibrates and is tranformed into a primordial sound with the nature of a cry nada. It shouts out the universe, which is not distinct from itself; that is to say, it thinks it--hence the word sabda word. Meditation is the supreme 'word': it sounds, that is, it vibrates, submitting all things to the fragmentation of life; this is why it is nada vibration....Sound sabda, which is of the nature of nada, resides in all living beings" (cited in Music and the Power of Sound 3). The bindu, the zero-stop and focal point of meditation, is the most compressed expression of the most extreme form of sequentiality we can so far imagine. From this starting point, every movement generates "vibration and therefore a sound that is peculiar to it. Such a sound, of course, may not be audible to our rudimentary ears, but it does exist as pure sound. Since each element of matter produces a sound, the relation of elements can be expressed by a relation of sounds" (p. 4). Danielou continues, emphasizing the evolutionary plasticity of perception. Going parallel at the limit of our sense modalities happens by making links, and this sharing of the "spheres of perception" inherent in the concept bhuta, if it is to be translated in and across Word media, will required an embodied rhetoric, because "although those pure, absolute sounds that kabir calls 'inaudible music' cannot be perceived by our ears, they may be perceptible for more delicate instruments, and the perception of such sounds is one of the stages in the practice of yoga" (p. 4). Such delicate instruments are fashioned in remix culture according to the mash-up principle that brings cultures of rhythm together with the parallel processing built into each potential node of entrainment, each "personal" computer.