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George asked:

I have been trying to write on and understand whether disorder can be a form of order. Sometimes I
feel that even though a situation may seem highly chaotic, it may be still be looked on as an
organized situation. One analogy I can put to example is the case of noise vs. music. Another one I
can put forward is when artists tend to create an organized mess of some sort to add to the balance
and composition of a piece.

I am not too sure yet and I'm hoping some of you can help me with this.

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The issue of order vs. disorder is a very nasty one, because it is involved not merely with issues of
causality, but also with how we perceive of, conceive of, and symbolize pattern. Thus answering this
question to any depth must involved discourses not only in physics and math but in psychology of
perception, cognitive science, and aesthetics. But your question seems to have to do with art rather
than physics, chaos theory, or cognition, so I'll focus on that. One thing I would recommend is that
you be very clear on what you mean by "disorder" and "order". For example, to take a musical case,
when jazz was first introduced it was considered highly chaotic and disordered; yet today it is seen
not merely as very structured but rather old-fashioned in that regard. Has jazz changed? Of course
not, so our perception of what is "ordered" in music has changed. Why is that? Surely it is because
there is now so much jazz and jazz-derived music we hear, from infancy, that we learn to extract, i.e.,
to hear, patterns in it easily. However, since our pattern-comprehension is very flexible when we are
young and becomes more difficult for us to change as we get older (because, if for no other reason,
we must alter much more later than when we start), when a new style of music is introduced we have
trouble hearing it coherently. Thus atonal music was a real stretch when it was introduced; now we
yawn.

What about "noise vs. music"? Do you mean noise literally, i.e., "white noise": what we hear in the
wind, the ocean, running water, and so forth, that is, literal random vibrations in the air? Or do you
mean something heardas noise, which as we have seen above can be almost anything that we are
not experienced hearing the structure in? Again, when you say that an artist creates an "organized
mess" you are not referring to literal noise but to an aural structure that is not easily comprehended,
right?

There are two categories of "noise", then... one being literal random vibrations, the other being
pattern whose structure we do not comprehend or have trouble comprehending. You can see, then,
that the "organized mess" is probably not actually a mess except for someone not familiar with that
composer's idiom. You might do a little reading in gestalt psychology: see Koffka or Kohler, for
example. Arnheim has a book, Art and Visual Perception,on the visual aspect of structure in art. As
for sound, there's a lot on music perception these days: Music and Meaning,edited by Robinson;
Music, Art and Metaphysics,by Levinson; Listening and Voice,by Ihde are just a small sample.

Steven Ravett Brown