Composing the Archive

“Memory demands newness. You have to always update your archive” (Miller 113).

At the very opening of Rhythm Science, Paul D. Miller argues that rhythm science is a “circular logic, a database logic” (4). What follows is a mash-up and mix of art, sound, philosophical, and cultural theories expounded with a loopy exuberance. The writing performs what it purports, detouring and turning back again in a celebration of sound as sense—personal, public, present, and historical.

Although Miller doesn’t specifically refer to database logic again, the logics he discusses blend into an amalgam—maybe, more properly, an algorithm—of ideas, not fixed, not linear. Especially not entropic. His is a generative world. Like the universe itself, there’s no center and no edge, just like the logic of a database. There’s movement, progression, digression, regression.

A rhythm scientist is an archivist of sound, text, and image, according to Miller (16). Implicitly, the archive itself is dynamic, not just its creator. And who is the creator of an archive, anyway? It’s not just the person who collects, but the person who uses the collection. There’s this built-in potentiality—stored energy—ready for an infinite carnival. Arhives (for Miller, his collection of recordings) serve as supplements to memory—vectors of memory and composition. We mix the archive. We compose it. We access the past though it and compose the future from it.

Paradox reigns in the world of rhythm science. Nothing is original, and yet everything is.

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