Why Glitch?

I initially decided to incorporate Glitch into my work as the sounds and visuals of malfunction and mistakes are often very difficult and challenging to listen to, look at, and hard to ignore. Popular music can often slip into the background, because as listeners our ears are trained to absorb western musical traditions, tired song structures, chord progressions and major and minor scales. When experiencing these sounds can often fade into the background. But jarring mistakes and glaring sound errors are harder for a listener to overlook.

As Stuart discusses we ignore the continuous drone of café music, yet ‘the stuttering CD in the café environment causes all to stop and take notice’ (Stuart 2003: 47). Hearing the same sounds and music day in and day out causes them to fade into the background, until we stop listening to them altogether. It’s not until we are presented with a sound that is aurally interesting or different that we begin to again take notice. Stuart adds that sounds such as mistakes demand attention, as what could be worse than the sound of a skipping, glitching CD?’ (Stuart 2003: 47). Disruptive sounds of this kind grab our attention, and awake us from our aural slumber, and force us to listen again.

Thompson discusses how Glitch was initially a reaction to the stagnant state of computer based music, yet during the peak of the genres popularity the ‘techniques may also be on their way to becoming as formulaic as those of the techno against which it originally railed’ which lead to a ‘rather static aesthetic situation’ (Thompson 2004: 214). He continues to add that Glitch ran the risk of ‘becoming the ‘Rocky’ of digital audio’ (Thompson 2004: 214). Krapp agreed and adds that Glitch ‘repetition reduces originality and reduces unpredictability’ (Krapp 2011: 69. For this reason I began to doubt my decision to include Glitch sounds into my project, as this once revolutionary musical idea had grown stale. Thompson suggests ‘perhaps it is time for it to re-invent itself in a way that offers a way past the impasse which its own self-consciously limited vocabulary has tended to produce’ (Thompson 2004: 215). So, I decided to veer away from the traditional Glitch approach, and instead decided to incorporate a variety of glitch-based techniques into my approach to create a self-composing randomised orchestra.