the Dionysian mirror of the world

It is a mirror, because as a mode of immaterial production it relates to the structuring of theoretical paradigms, far ahead of concrete production. It is thus an immaterial recording surface for human works, the mark of something missing, a shred of utopia to decipher, information in negative, a collective memory allowing those who hear it to record their own personalized, specified, modeled meanings, affirmed in time with the beat - a collective memory of order and genealogies, the repository of the word and the social score.

Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music 9