Spiegel’s writing prompts the reader to reflect upon the process of composition through the lens of information theory. This means that one is encouraged to think of composition as this act of piecing together sequences with the calculated introduction of noise/randomness; I found this idea of sequences to be particularly resonant with the way we had been using TidalCycles (running loops and adjusting said loops to vary each time meshes nicely with this idea of music as varied sequences). Similarly, Spiegel’s portrayal of music as “a communications medium in a noisy world” works nicely with TidalCycles’s visualization of music in the form of code (as opposed to musical notation), which makes it easier to perceive music in such a way.

Also fascinating was Spiegel’s description of the relativity of randomness: “any signal, no matter how internally consistent or meaningful it is within its own context, may be perceived as random noise relative to some other coherent signal.” Randomness is thus not a hard value in that it cannot be inextricably assigned to a certain signal, but rather a quality hugely dependent on the context that surrounds said signal. Questions then arise: When might something be too random—can something even be “too” random if randomness is contextual? Different people will experience and interpret the randomness of a certain signal differently—how can one account for this “felt” randomness? Can anything be 100% random, or more importantly, 0% random? I was accordingly left to wonder about the relationship between perceived randomness and phenomenology. How does one experience the random?

One last idea that led me to further thought was Spiegel’s suggestion that “what we interpret as spontaneous generation may be just the transformation of previously experienced material as it moves within the human perceptual and cognitive systems.” I found this thought to be hugely interesting—everything is a remix of a remix of a remix, but to what degree? There is something poetic in this idea that we as humans express ourselves in ways that are individually unique yet inevitably affected by how others have expressed themselves (plus, “the noise of our many coexistent memories and thoughts” is a beautiful phrase). We humans wish to communicate in a noisy world—and we sing and dance and cry as composite creatures, shaped by those we have listened to and shaping those who listen to us. All amid a noisy, noisy world.