An excerpt from a research paper I wrote for Sound-Modernity-America:
The word glitch comes from the Yiddish word glitshn, which means to slip, slide, or glide; it can also be defined mechanically as “a slippage of gears of wheels-a failure to engage-a scratch, a small nick in a smooth surface.” (Sangild, 258; Young, 48) Either definition fits as both an aural and technical description of glitch; the music of Oval evokes a feeling of weightlessness, a loss of friction, but it is also created out of the intended failure of optical lasers to engage with data on compact discs.
As a genre based on exploiting technology, glitch benefits from the drive within the music industry for higher fidelity in recordings; electronic music as a whole is “a hugely sprawling form hyped on progress”. (Bates, 275; Battaglia) Each advance offers new possibilities in content derived from error. The fluidity made possible by the re/de-coding of information into a variety of formats not only immerses us in the flux of the digital, but it causes read and write errors to emerge out of these encodings; it is the job of the glitch musician to intervene by making these errors aural. (Vanhanen)
Glitch utilizes radical shifts in dynamics and tone, which reflect the “depletion of ‘natural’ rhythms” in modern life. (Young, 47) Technology provides the content of the music, manipulated into creating rhythmic forms through the “nature” of the process being used. The technology of sound recording renders the once ephemeral aural realm into the material; moreover, as an object the recording is capable of breaking down. (Young, 47) While vinyl recordings may jump or become locked into grooves, these errors are different from those of the digital; a CD player does not skip over data, but rather reads it incorrectly. (Stuart, 48) Moreover, to say that the disc is “skipping” seems to place a bizarre sort of agency on the technology; it is more so that through human intervention, the data that is being read, or the method of reading, has been modified. (Hainge:07, 34)
Not only are compact discs manipulated into being read incorrectly, but image or text files are converted to audio formats and sampled, raw data is used to control algorithmic patches, processors are overloaded, and bit rates are reduced. (Cascone, 17; Sangild, 259) Through digital signal processing, one can zoom in on the artifacts that appear in digital sound files, and thus reveal the bugs that are always present in it; with granular synthesis one can “pulverize” sound samples, reducing them to modulated bits and clicks. (Bates, 288 ; Cascone, 13; Young, 51) These minuscule artifacts and bits are often constituted as material grains of the digital; the 1s and 0s made manifest. (Whitelaw, 3) The breakdown of digital mediums is “making audible the process of sound itself.” (Vanhanen) As Phillip Sherburne writes in Clicks and Cuts vol. 2:
“the click is the remainder, the bit spit out of the break. The indigestible left over that code won’t touch. Cousin to the glitch, the click sounds the alarm. It alerts the listener to error...a compressed millisecond of static stands in for the hi-hat, recognizable as such because that’s where the hi-hat would have been.” (cited in Hainge: 02, 292-293)
Thus, glitch as a technological manipulation is a “meta-discursive practice” in that it produces new compositions that are not only inspired by previous musical works (“the hi-hat”, but derive their content from “the technological conditions and limitations in which those recordings emerged” (the “static”). (Bates, 289) Moreover, this play-with-medium transforms these technological conditions into new objects to be manipulated into composition; it is a method of “materializing normally transparent media substrates.” (Whitelaw, 5) Glitch manipulates it's own form into a sort of content; and this manipulation itself constitutes a critique of the capitalist-technological narrative of digital perfectibility and progress, while at the same time assuming it's place as a marketable genre within such a narrative. (Hainge: 02, 291-292) This constant short-circuiting of, or “self-critical reflection” upon, the system within which glitch operates creates
“a loop from which emanates an intensive, non-representational expression that cannot territorialize but can render possible an infinite number of possible connections.”(Hainge:02, 293)
This loop is similar to the actual creation of glitches, during which the equipment continues to operate, but merely malfunctions; thus, it enables connections that were unintended by the manufacturers and designers of such digital technology, or it reads data that is different from that which was originally encoded.
As technology breaks down,
“we become aware of its construction and design; the tool becomes unfamiliar, no longer an unquestioned extension of ourselves.” (Sangild, 267)
It is important to note that in binary logic, “there is not only the on and off modus but as well the switch which transfers the connection states.” (Sczepanski, Media Theory) By causing the CD to read 1s as 0s, or by zooming in on mis-encodings in audio files, glitch highlights this seemingly unrepresentable third factor in digital technology. Although binary code theoretically offers a perfect representation of information, there is always the possibility of malfunction at the site of the switch between states. The intentional glitches of artists like Oval reveal “a subtextual layer embedded in the compact disc”; a kind of indecipherable writing rendered aural. (Cascone, 13) Moreover, this persistence of failure in the technology demonstrates how the digital “always relies on a successful integration of failure into its systems.” (Hainge:07, 35) Every new possibility for connections is necessarily accompanied by new errors or conjugations; it is the successful mixing of the two that creates the illusion of music.
Bates, Eliot, “Glitches, Bugs, and Hisses: The Degeneration of Musical Recordings and the Contemporary Musical Work”, Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate, New York: Routledge, 2004.
Battaglia, Andy, Sharps and Flats, Salon.com, Feb. 8, 2000, http://archive.salon.com/ent/music/review/2000/02/08/clickscuts/index.html, accessed 2/27/08.
Cascone, Kim, “The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post-Digital” Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music”, Computer Music Journal, Vol. 24, No.4, Winter 2000.
Hainge, Greg, “A Whisper or a Scream? Experimental music sounds a warning for the future of theory”, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Vol. 16, No. 3, 2002.
Hainge, Greg
Sangild, Torben, “Glitch-The Beauty of Malfunction”, Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate, New York: Routledge, 2004.
Sczepanski, Achim
Vanhanen, Janne, Loving the Ghost in the Machine: Aesthetics of Interruption, ctheory.net, 2001, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=312, accessed 3/7/08.
Whitelaw , Mitchell, “Sound Particles and Microsonic Materialism”, Contemporary Music Review Vol. 22, No. 4, 2003.
Young, Rob, “Worship the Glitch: Digital Music, Electronic Disturbance”, Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music, New York: Continuum, 2002.
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