seeking of multi-uses for rooms and things and objects, in a 
single word—the iconic. In music and poetry and painting, the 
tactile implosion means the insistence on qualities that are 
close to casual speech. Thus Schönberg and Stravinsky and 
Carl Orff and Bartók, far from being advanced seekers of 
esoteric effects, seem now to have brought music very close to 
the condition of ordinary human speech. It is this colloquial 
rhythm that once seemed so unmelodious about their work. 
Anyone who listens to the medieval works of Perotinus or Dufay 
will find them very close to Stravinsky and Bartók. The great 
explosion of the Renaissance that split musical instruments off 
from song and speech and gave them specialist functions is 
now being played backward in our age of electronic implosion.

     One of the most vivid examples of the tactile quality of 
the TV image occurs in medical experience. In closed-circuit