Need I say more? This song is a definition and an example all rolled into one! Its mind blowing Handsome Boy Modeling School isn't more wellknown. -Ian

Ian, the selector! Nice cut--in this mixture of sound, word, and image we get a little history lesson--we hear about how hip-hop practitioners used the available means of persuasion and technology to pioneer the art of selecting and mixing essential elements of music, by which endless novelty and complexity can arise.

Our freesound exercises let us follow in the footsteps of these pioneers--in wiki, different tracks resonate or dissonate, and teach us about how to find audience. We respond with our whole being to the combination of complex patterns of information as they, in Brian Rotman's (2000) words, “go parallel” (p. 56).

But then, we must write--when we participate in multimedia, the art and craft of composing recognizable sequences of ideas with sentences becomes that much more important. So we will say more about the still and moving images (and moving images drenched in complex sonic information) that we share. After the art of selection, we advance to the art of mixing.

The "Freesound exercise" encourages the overlay of tracks that will "work on their own." But sound editors like Audacity let us focus on acts of troping and bringing sounds together in particular ways--we can "tune" or selections to our understanding of our audiences assumptions, beliefs, and knowledge. Put another way, Freesound provides no effects menus, nor does it provide the control over the real-time patterning like faders and toggle switches in the turntable-mixer assemblages Grandmaster Flash, Kool Herc, and Grand Wizard Theodore designed on the technological templates coming out of Jamaican dance halls in the 1960s and 1970s. However, even if we no experience or with the tropological controls and functions of mixers , turtables and casssette players, we can cultivate ingenuity in the fine art of mixing tropes, idioms, and forms in our writing/unwriting.

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