refrain on tune

Music and rhetoric share practices of tuning. Due to the dynamic nature of their media, musicians and information adepts alike must tune at the beginnng, the middle, and the end of a communicative performance. First: listening as tuning. Then, following, joining. Further, arrranging. Setting the envelope, sharing. Rhetorical and musical adjustments that cut and rearrange a swatch of information, that connect diverse strands and move them into and out of phase, until they are in accord, all manner of adapting, altering: tuning.

Let's compare the multiple sense and action of tuning described in the OED with most compressed definitions of rhetorical actions (Aristotle's available means, etc) that have been handed down to us from Greek rhetoricians, philosophers, and musicians. Then, drape examples of tuning action over this definitional trellis.

If we consult OED, the most exhaustive English language sourcebook for definition and etymology, to tune is "to adapt (the voice, song, etc.) to a particular tone, or to the expression of a particular feeling or subject; to modify or modulate the tones of, according to the purpose in view." Also "To put into a proper condition for producing some effect; to adapt to a particular purpose"

tuning and......turning

troping and wyrding

In an infodynamic model of rhetoric, when we we say "tuning in" we are thinking of a "receiver," a tuning device that listens for patterns amidst complexity.

1. For many of us, tuning a reciever, searching for a frequency, calls to mind the flutter of the knob and the torque of the dial. (image of kitchen radio, hear, .mp3 as well)

2. Do this, notice how "tuning in" organizes attention by becoming something else

3. Recap SonicStigmergy argument: pattern-matching. McStumblin': "trolling for exergy."

Rhetoric, as we've known it, has come down to the present age as "alphabetic writing's equivalent of prosody" in Brian Rotman's formulation. "The gestures which accompany and determine the reception of alphabetic texts...are rhetorics, figurations, and styles" (Alphabetic Writing in parallax 98). But this rhetoric is a symptom or after-effect of a gross surgery, by which alphabetic writing separated prosody (rhythm, affect) from speech, and from the wyrd. McLuhan (to show "how so?"). The advent of biotelemetrics of pleasure, security anticipates as-of-yet unknown potentials for collective bodies conjoined by rhythmic entrainment. The open/close rhythms of artistic and scientific impulse (and their comixture) invites to do more than simply revisit ancient archives of rhythm, affect, and prosody (sonic and otherwise). These practices, too, must be tuned and put into new mixtures. As part of a rhetorical enterprise of timing and response, where writing means writing together, rhetors must constantly refashion anew the appropriate response, the timely mode of audience address. Organizing attention, then, involves a fair amount of writing, right on time: on-the-fly high velocity narratives, compressed descriptions, definitional frames and supporting examples. Description becomes an art of tuning in, necessary in order to participate the in regulatory mechanisms of composing/reposing. Clusters of writers, converging on a project create positive feedback loops.

Over time, and with practice, they tune into the corporeal and haptic (and shifting) technological assemblages that will distribute the body, and promote the development of as-of-yet-unforseen potentials out of discrete but captured (and therefore able to be recontextualized indexically, inexhaustibly) differentials of force.

Describe exogeneity of musical practice, here. Anticipates distributed authorship, rhetorics of gesture.

block text, Brian Rotman, here.

For Rotman, focusing here on the very conditions of our mathematics (so far!), [Donald's "principle of exogeneity"] elaborated in his "account of evolution can be extended from cognition to memory to systems of capture. In other words, yes, exogeneity of music, math, and all manner of writing happens via rhythm. Thus, just as "the human possession of something as basic as number sense is not, contrary to accepted views, an innate ability or 'faculty' or even an endogenously evolved skill, but a capacity assembled from different and independent brain activities each on their own having nothing to do with number, so captured gestures promise the construction of previously non-existent assemblages of bodily affect, of new neurophysiologies, new forms of corporeality, new subjectivities," which will "be assembled outside the individual via networks" (Rotman in parallax 103). Wikidelic rhetorics and wiki-inflected cultures of learning emerge in this dynamic, as part of its parallel construction: rhythmic rhetorics for commons practice.