There is no Random here.

There is no such thing as chance.  Yesterday, I wrote about white noise, sound generated by computer synthesis.  The nature of computation makes it inevitable that predictable patterns will emerge. 

If I throw  the I Ching, is it non-determinist?  Is it a Chance operation?  

Having started out by saying that there is no such thing as chance, I've probably pre-determined the response.   The throwing of the I Ching is precisely determined...by the surface that the bones land on, by the shape and density of the different staves, by the angle of my hand when I throw them, the subtle difference in force applied from each finger and by 86,000 conditions of karma.  There is no stage along a throwing of the I Ching that is not determined by the previous.  No doubt it is hard to recreate, and harder to anticipate the result.  

I end up suggesting that a Chance event is one that could only be recreated by the system that created it in the first place.  Something like the I Ching depends on the variables of a given moment .  All moments, all phenomena are dependent on the criteria that created them.  

Randomness is an intuitive algorithm, a process that is best understood in the fluid sense of Mind.  Mind resides between the physical senses.   Each Chance operation is the result of a limited definition of the system.  Define the limits differently, and the operation is part of a known sequence.  Mind is  the unlimited system.

It's unclear to me how John Cage actually applied the I Ching to his musical process. It does seem that he used the I Ching to generate sequences of numbers,  perhaps applied to pitch, duration.  But did the I Ching also provide guidance on broader issues?  Could the wisdom texts associated with each hexagram have provided answers to  structural questions?

Merce Cunningham was a choreographer who collaborated with Cage and also allowed Indeterminate actions to create the piece.  They would work separately, with the music and dance coming together for the performance. 

It is in our nature to see patterns when events occur simultaneously.  The motion  of a tractor mower in a park across the river seems to move to  the same beat as the pulsing engine of a passing barge.  Maybe they do.  Maybe they don't.  Maybe then again they really do, and it is only the tenuous membrane  of linear chronology that keeps things  in order.

Static is a form of noise that lends itself to pattern seeking.   Recall the scene in the movie Contact where Jodie Foster  listens to the output of the telescope  array through headsets.  I've started a series of pieces, 9 in all, based on a  sample of computer generated white noise.  I use visual filters to enhance patterns, each of the nine revealing a different emphasis.   The effect is long, sustained, biological.  

This is an engagement with complexity and liminality rather than randomness. 

R Murry Schafer is a composer who has written on the idea of the Soundscape.  In his book The Tuning of the World, (1977), he identifies the physical connection of the human body, and the natural sounds of the environment, using a quote from Thomas Mann The Magic Mountain:

“ Day after day one walks along the strand, listening to the indolent splashing of the wavelets, gauging the gradual crescendo to the heavier treading and on to the organized warfare of the breakers.  The mind must be slowed to catch the million transformations of the water, on sand, on shale, against driftwood, against the seawall.  Each drop tinkles at a different pitch;  each wave sets a different filtering on an inexhaustible supply of white noise.  Some sounds are discrete, others continuous.  In the sea, the two fuse in primordial unity.  The rhythms of the sea are many;  infrabiological - for the water changes pitch and timbre faster than the ear’s resolving power to catch it’s changes;  biological - the waves rhyme with the patterns of heart and lung and the tides with night and day;  and suprabiolgical - the eternal inextinguishable presence of water”

It would be interesting to bring a choreographer in, perhaps show the spectrogram of each of my nine pieces.  Or perhaps simply give a score with the text  "9 pieces each 20 minutes derived from White Noise"  Or maybe just "9 x 20 minutes".