Echo is one of the most elemental tropes common to the infoquake and and musical practice. Voluminous writing detailing electronic experiments with sound have rendered a fine grain on these terms, in a resolution comparable to the close attention philosophers and rhetoricians have always given to metaphor and metonymy. Teacher and composer Allen Strange (1972) points out that

"the terms ‘reverberation’ and ‘echo’ are often used interchangeably, but when working in an electronic medium there is a distinct difference between these two effects...reverberation is the sum total of all reflections of a sound arriving at a given point at different time,” wheras echo is the perception of the individual attacks of reflections unfolding and reverberating in linear time. (p. 190)

When the vocabulary of sound, and especially dub, comes into the writing process, we can begin to distinguish these effects, ok, but is this an important step in finding well-tuned modes of response, i.e. learning to stop....let the silence build.....think like a drummer.....and listen for the "gap," or "place" the "fill?" Or is this the imposition of a methodology alien to dub? Already, mining such distinctions threaten separate us from reverberating possibilities. Composing forms of rhetorical address tuned to the timing and placement of echoes (or reverberations) must....echo and reverberate. Problem: space/time for a "how and when," for cultivating an ethics for interrupting the delay patterns of reverberation and echo defining an issue or line of inquiry? One step forward, 2 steps backward...

Indeed, these terms/techniques are not simply the inventions of electricians; jazz musicians have always used horns, reeds, strings, drums and voice to phase, flang, whah, reverberate and delay patterns of sound to create a space of interaction in sound. This is not to say troping sound starts with jazz, either. Alexander Weheliye (2005) reads W.E.B. DuBois’ Souls of Black Folks as "an extended echo chamber in which traces of spirituals reverberate with and against one another, forming a different textusonic machine...paving the way for future African American literary aesthetics, chiefly the Harlem Renaissance” and, of course, dub reggae, which emerged in the 1960s when “Jamaican producers started messing with the musical text via technological means—loosening its confines, turning up the bass and drum in the mix, distorting and displacing the centrality of the voice, opening it up to the cosmos" (p. 102). Dub’s essential features—echo, reverberation, delay, and the creation of gaps by subtracting and adding elements of a given composition—can be rehearsed in wikis.

I'm often times tuning to an audience of composition teachers; so, for teachers to consider:
-echo: a way of opening up classroom to a broader spectrum of compositional practice; for example, to what Weheliye names the "textusonic" potentials of African American aesthetics?

-and allowing the composition classroom to perhaps approach and enhance the the literary classroom’s ability to immerse students in the historical and political dimensions of diverse cultures of creative practice?

-echo in tape composition
world turning
tape heads...turning
decay/attack
blurring

echo and ecos: habitats for transhumanity
harmonics, envelope, and compression
from monadology to nomadology

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