Cage and Affect

John Cage appreciated natural sounds. Striving to produce similar sounds, he attempted to remove any of his intentionality from his music making: imitating nature, he used chance events.

But maybe when we follow chance events, we don't make nature-like sounds. They're nature-like in that they have the same underlying order, but not in the experience. The average person might sometimes listen to rain, but not to Cage.

Perhaps in order to imitate nature we must act very unlike nature? Perhaps our best approximation of nature cannot come about by imitating its processes, but by analyzing its results?