Home
Echoes = Consonance + Assonance
[Echoes] / Syllables = Self-Similarity of an Extended Line
Threshold of Self-Similarity (>.667, etc)=Modal Slant Rhyme (or Modal Text)
There’s “measurement” and “division”; there’s “self-similarity“ and “syllabic interval”.
There are two crucial elements that, at this point, it’s imperative for us to define if we’re going to continue to write in metrical structures. The first is the syllable, which is a simple unit; the syllable is unitary, a simple mathematical unit. But the second element is the echo. The echo is relational, something that exists only as a derivative of the unitary syllable. The echo is a mist, a notable participation in Likeness across two or more of these units, separated by a reasonable spatial distance, connected temporally via speech.
The echoes, in aggregate, become a measurement of self-similarity.
The line or block of text is composed of “syllables” and the echoes are the “measurements of likeness” between these fundamental elements. This will be the case for either in an individual line or a block of text that’s then either left as a block or then diced up into set intervals after the fact.
The section or sentence is a “self-similar line”, and the text is a “self-similar wave”, both of which come into being via measurement. The measurement defines the “mode” — a quotient range (>.667; .650-.800, etc) is just a variable restriction, like a mode.
These blocks of text could also be called “macrotones” in a sense, and by that I mean they have a measured quotient of self-similarity (which expresses itself via sound) that defines the unit, that can’t be divided without changing essentially. A macrotone of .754 even if divided equally into two will change essentially, it will no longer be .754. Whereas a microtone takes a tone and divides it — a macrotone is an aggregation of sound.
But the best example of all of this isn’t in Whitman or Pound or Ginsberg or Ashbery; it’s just the last line of the first verse of Big Pun’s “Twinz.”
“Dead in the middle of Little Italy little did we know
that we riddled some middleman who didn't do diddily”
“[D]ead [i]n the [m][i][d]dle of [L][i]ttle [I]t[a][l][y] [l][i]ttle [d][i]d we know
that we r[i][d]dled some [m][i][d]dle[m]an who [d][i][d]n't [d]o [d][i][d]d[i][l][y]”
31:31 .100
The self-similarity of “1.00” — peak lyricism? There are no fixed syllables per line here, and there’s no fixed pattern of stressed syllables, and there’s no technical end-rhyme, because although “Italy” and “diddily” might technically rhyme, in the incessant referencing back upon itself of the line, this outright rhyme is diluted by various the D’s, soft I’s, and L’s that ricochet violently across the line, engaging in fractional portions of consonance and assonance. An echoing. What I might even call a modal slant rhyme.