  We demonstrate how, with a purely empirical analysis of the irregular
lightcurve data, one can extract a great deal of information about the stellar
pulsation mechanism. An application to R Sct thus shows that the irregular
lightcurve is the result of the nonlinear interaction of two highly
nonadiabatic pulsation modes, namely a linearly unstable, low frequency mode,
and the second mode that, although linearly stable, gets entrained through a
2:1 resonance. In the parlance of nonlinear dynamics the pulsation is the
result of a 4 dimensional chaotic dynamics.
