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Glitches, Bugs, and Hisses: The Degeneration of Musical Recordings and the Contemporary Musical Work

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... The sound of malfunctioning electronics, which has become more commonly associated with the glitch genre (See Cascone: 2000;Young: 2002;Bates: 2004;Sangild: 2004), has also expanded the range of sounds in recorded music from feedback and distortion through to skipping CDs or other accidental noises. Sound artists like Yasunao Tone deliberately damage discs to create an unpleasant experience of extreme noise error, but Found are more likely to take an interest in extraneous sounds that have been captured accidentally during the recording process, which they then decide to reshape or leave intact rather than edit out. ...
Article
Brian Eno describes the recording studio as a compositional tool that has enabled composers to enjoy a more direct relationship with sound. This article will explore the use of the digital sampler as one of the studio tools that forms part of this creative process and focuses on interviews with a group of Edinburgh musicians called Found who successfully combine the writing of pop songs with the sampling of found sounds. The core song-writing partnership share an art school background and I was keen to discover if they use the sampler and other tools to sculpt sound in a similar way to how they paint. Much of the academic literature on digital sampling within popular music studies has been skewed towards its disruptive consequences for copyright law and, while legal and moral questions are still relevant, I am keen to concentrate on the processes of music making and the aesthetic choices made by composers and producers in the studio. Recent ethnographic work by Joseph Schloss has centred on these questions in relation to hip-hop and it is important to examine and understand how the sampler continues to be used by musicians and producers in a variety of genres.
... Glitch music celebrates these noises to such an extent that they become ubiquitous to the sound of the genre. In this sense, glitch can be seen to be a form of redemption of the failure of the system within which it is created (Bates, 2004;Hainge, 2007;Hofer, 2006;Sangild, 2004). 'Swift and Certain Sanction' is how the response to failure is described in the dystopian future that provides one ending of the 'The Invisible Collar'. ...
... For discussions of the soundscape and its relevance to the fields of sound studies and anthropology, see Kelman 2010 andSamuels, Meintjes, Ochoa, andPorcello 2010. 4 For more on skipping CDs, malfunctioning electronics, and the use of accidental noises in the genre of glitch, see Cascone 2000, Young 2002, Bates 2004, Sangild 2004, and Kelly 2009. 5 See Pinch and Bijsterveld 2004 Emulator 5,8,11,47,[69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80]82,161,92n17 131n10, 134, 145, popular music 1, 9, 10, 27, 30, 50, 69, 97-98, 131n10, 141, 145-146, 159 Star' 54 Vogel,Peter 5,9,10,17,[23][24]26,42 Webley, G. 65n4 Wedge, Scott 9,[69][70]72,76,[81][82]89,90 ...
... Audio files require a large amount of processing power from the computer, and in the 1990s, when processing power was still quite expensive, the computer's playback of audio files often ended in hiccups or crashes due to buffer underruns. 8 For discussions of glitch music, see, for example, Bates 2004, Cascone 2000, and Young 2002 ...
Chapter
Who produces sound and music? And in what spaces, localities and contexts? As the production of sound and music in the 21st Century converges with multimedia, these questions are critically addressed in this new edited collection by Samantha Bennett and Eliot Bates. Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound features 16 brand new articles by leading thinkers from the fields of music, audio engineering, anthropology and media. Innovative and timely, this collection represents scholars from around the world, revisiting established themes such as record production and the construction of genre with new perspectives, as well as exploring issues in cultural and virtual production.
... Such techniques as these, and the incorporation of vinyl noise, records skipping or playing at the wrong speed, are also embedded in subsequent postmodern musical genres such as Trip-Hop 1 . A comprehensive discussion of glitch music can be found in [2]. ...
Conference Paper
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In this paper we discuss the use of a recently developed audio compression approach: Audio Compression Exploiting Repetition (ACER) as a compositional tool for glitch composition and remixing. ACER functions by repeating similar sections of audio where they occur in a file and discarding the repetitive data. Thresholds for similarity can be defined using this approach, allowing for various degrees of (dis)similarity between materials identified as 'repetitive'. Through our initial subjective evaluation of ACER, we unexpectedly discovered that the compression method produced musically interesting results on some materials with higher levels of compression. Whilst listeners demonstrate this level of loss of fidelity to be unacceptable for the purposes of compression, it shows potential as a performance or production tool. When applied to pop songs the predicable form of the music was disrupted, introducing moments of novelty, while retaining the songs quantized rhythmic structure. In this paper we propose the use of ACER as a suitable method for producing sonic materials for 'glitch' composition. We present the use of ACER for this purpose with regards to a variety of materials that may be suitable for glitch or electroacoustic composition and using ACER in several different ways to process and reproduce musical audio.
... Cela n'a rien à voir avec la gamme des sonorités offerte dès lors que l'électronique s'en mêle (Eno, 2004, p. 130). » Les sonorités de dispositifs électroniques en dysfonctionnement, plus communément associées au genre glitch (Cascone, 2000 ;Bates, 2004 ;Sangild, 2004 ;Prior, 2008a) , ont également élargi la palette sonore des musiques enregistrées via les effets Larsen, les distorsions de CD qui sautent et autres bruits fortuits. L'artiste sonore Yasunao Tone abîme délibérément des disques pour rechercher des sons désagréables, mais Found préfère exploiter des sons extérieurs enregistrés par hasard lors d'une séance d'enregistrement ; par la suite, le groupe décide soit de les refaçonner ou de les conserver tels quels plutôt que de les couper. ...
Article
Full-text available
Transmission loss and “found” According to Brian Eno, the recording studio is a composition tool that enables musicians to enjoy a more direct relationship with sound. This article examines the role of the sampler as a technology that is tightly interlinked with the creative process. Most academic publications on sampling digress from their initial subject to focus on the impact of the use of these tools on copyright. The aim here is to examine the process of musical creation and the aesthetic choices made in the studio, in order to analyze the role of digital technologies in the expansion of composers’ musical palette. The shift from an approach of appropriation based on recognizable sampling to the manipulation of errors and accidents defies current definitions of sampling and its relation to post-modernism.
... The sound of malfunctioning electronics, which has become more commonly associated with the glitch genre (See Cascone: 2000;Young: 2002;Bates: 2004;Sangild: 2004), has also expanded the range of sounds in recorded music from feedback and distortion through to skipping CDs or other accidental noises. Sound artists like Yasunao Tone deliberately damage discs to create an unpleasant experience of extreme noise error, but Found are more likely to take an interest in extraneous sounds that have been captured accidentally during the recording process, which they then decide to reshape or leave intact rather than edit out. ...
Article
Full-text available
Brian Eno describes the recording studio as a compositional tool that has enabled composers to enjoy a more direct relationship with sound. This article will explore the use of the digital sampler as one of the studio tools that forms part of this creative process and focuses on interviews with a group of Edinburgh musicians called Found who successfully combine the writing of pop songs with the sampling of found sounds. The core song-writing partnership share an art school background and I was keen to discover if they use the sampler and other tools to sculpt sound in a similar way to how they paint. Much of the academic literature on digital sampling within popular music studies has been skewed towards its disruptive consequences for copyright law and, while legal and moral questions are still relevant, I am keen to concentrate on the processes of music making and the aesthetic choices made by composers and producers in the studio. Recent ethnographic work by Joseph Schloss has centred on these questions in relation to hip-hop and it is important to examine and understand how the sampler continues to be used by musicians and producers in a variety of genres.
... Beginning with 1960s rock musicians integrating feedback and distortion in their performances, glitch continued with rap music's incorporation of vinyl glitches with the 'scratch effect,' and Yasunao Toné's inauguration of the CD glitch effect in 1985 with his razor-sliced and scotch-taped CDs. 9 But it remains an open question whether glitch actually functions to reconcile consumers to imperfections in sound recording mediaas Eliot Bates illustrated when he reported finding a two CD set of experimental electronic music (including tracks by the glitch maestro, Oval) for sale at a discount because the surface of one disc was scratched. 10 We may prefer our imperfections perfectly reproduced-the musical equivalent of preferring one's denims pre-frayed by Versace: a characteristically postmodern preference for a quotation or simulacrum of imperfection, rather than the 'real thing.' ...
Article
The broad aim of the paper that follows is to test the claim of critics such as Miriam Fraser and Steve Connor that the modernist deconstruction of the music/noise dichotomy has entered a distinctively postmodern phase. The article below therefore traces the history and poetics of this dichotomy from the modernist avant-garde to contemporary Australian postmodernist Sound Art, moving from a discussion of the ideas of Russolo, Cage, Boulez and Schaeffer, to a close reading of Ros Bandt's "Stack" (2000- 01). These themes as expressed in contemporary Australian composition are then explored in Part Two.
Article
Parmi les musiciens associés à la « scène de Canterbury », Robert Wyatt est sans doute le seul à avoir atteint un niveau de notoriété considérable pendant sa carrière, tout en gardant – paradoxalement – le profil d’une « anti-rockstar ». Dans cet article, j’aborderai la réception de la musique de Wyatt auprès du public « averti » : en particulier, je me focaliserai sur la correspondance électronique d’une liste de diffusion italienne (composée de musiciens, journalistes musicaux, médiateurs culturels, tous fins connaisseurs de l’œuvre de Wyatt) et sur l’occasion qui en fut le point de départ, à savoir la publication du très controversé The Different You, album hommage à Wyatt réalisé en 1998 par un groupe d’artistes italiens assez connus. L’analyse de cette correspondance sera mise en relation avec les fan studies, et en particulier avec la littérature sur les « anti-fans » et les fanzines, et elle me permettra de discuter les aspects – musicaux, humains, politiques – qui contribuent au succès de Wyatt auprès d’un certain type de public.
Chapter
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On account of its self-conscious rejection of professional-standard playing and production techniques, and of its emphasis on the home-made, lo-fi practice is often discussed in terms of its authenticity. However, while the concept is widely discussed across popular music genres, what is meant by "authenticity" remains elusive and much open to being twisted to suit one's own ideological cravings. In this essay, I examine more closely how the concept of authenticity is commonly employed in lo-fi discourse, highlighting the tensions and contradictions surrounding the usage of the term, and evaluating ways in which the concept may be more usefully understood in the context of lo-fi practice. The central thesis informing my analysis is that technologically reproduced sound cannot escape representation , and therefore any ideology that regards specific processes and working practices as marks of authenticity can only incur in logical inconsistencies and technological mystifications.
Chapter
Das 3. Kapitel entfaltet den – für das gesamte Buch – zentralen Begriff der Unschärfe sowohl von der Seite der FL her als auch von Seiten der Kunst, insbesondere der Musik, und bildet damit eine Grundlage, auch für die Analysen in den folgenden Kapiteln vor. Im Gegensatz zu vermeidbarer „Vagheit“ sind graduelle Unschärfen nicht nur grundsätzlich unvermeidlich. Sie wirken in vielen Prozessen, sowohl bei der kompositorischen als auch bei der klanglichen Realisation der Werk-Idee produktiv und gestaltbildend, teils indirekt, teils auch gezielt eingesetzt. Mit Bezug auf die im Kap. 2 eingeführten ‚Existenzformen‘ wird sehr genau gezeigt, wie die Unschärfen sich in den Phasen des Musikprozesses und in verschiedenen Musikgattungen entfalten und welche Mechanismen wirken und eingesetzt werden, um sie für die musikalische Gestaltung zu beherrschen und produktiv zu machen, etwa ‚Leitmotiv‘, Transkription. Dabei wird auch auf Grenzerfahrungen von Unschärfe in diesen Prozessen aufmerksam gemacht, etwa Vergessen‚ falsche Erinnerungen‘, Vorurteile, Halluzinationen.
Chapter
This chapter unfolds the central concept of blurs or fuzziness from the side of FL as well as from the side of art, especially music, and thus forms, continuing Chapter 2, a basis, also for the analyses in the following chapters. “Vagueness” is avoidable, fuzziness is principally not. But: In many processes, both in the compositional and the tonal realization of the idea of the work, fuzziness has a productive and formative effect, sometimes indirectly, sometimes purposefully. With reference to the ‘forms of existence’ it is shown precisely how the blurs unfold in different phases of the musical process and in different musical genres, and which mechanisms work and are used in order to master and make them productive for the musical composition and reception, such as ‘leitmotiv’, transcription, reinforcement of recollection by technical re-/production. Attention is also drawn to border experiences, such as ‘forgetting’, false memories, prejudices, hallucinations.
Thesis
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My PhD was a practice-as-research project. I felt, after submitting the thesis, that a large part of the written research could be useful for other researchers, but other material had significance only for my own creative practice. The thesis has not been available until now. I recently decided to collect the most widely useful material together from the thesis and ‘publish’ it via ResearchGate and Academia. || Original Abstract:- Electronica developed in the last decade of the twentieth century as an area of liminal musical practice that breached the creative and institutional divides between academic and popular electronic music. In forging innovative modes of composition and technological practice, electronica artists created a musical terrain requiring new modes of analysis to develop an understanding of the poetics of electronica. This study responds to a shortfall in previous work in the field by developing an integrative and multi-perspectival analysis of the creative practices and contexts of electronica. This is achieved through historical, contextual, theoretical and practical research that synthesises material drawn from the fields of cultural studies, sociology, musicology and popular music studies. In considering how electronica comes into existence, the study identifies the individual and social factors that combine in the compositional practices of electronica. It explores the historical development of electronica, and examines genre, style and how electronica has challenged the fixity of popular and institutional musical categorisation. The social authorship of music, where electronica musicians are identified as séantifically and dialogically channelling earlier musical voices, is balanced with an outline of a psychotopographic internal musical dialogue. The producer-creator is identified as drawing both from individual and social repositories in forming musical works. Moving beyond technological determinist and constructivist models, the study emphasises the affordances of music technologies, and the compositional practices that electronica musicians have developed as a response to and in collaboration with these technologies. A development of themes concerning atemporality and spectrality in the fields of glitch and hauntology provides a backdrop to my creative practice as obe:lus that informs and was informed by the findings of my historical, contextual and theoretical research. Both glitch and hauntology are viewed as problematising notions of future and past by critiquing and foregrounding the media through and from which they are created.
Thesis
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This dissertation seeks to discuss how new tools for mediating sounds have developed and changed our aesthetic evaluation and framing of musical sounds. The possibility to create and reproduce sounds has had a great impact on the aesthetic development of music and is a topic that can be approached from many angles. This dissertation focuses on three different technological tools that have been important in shaping music from the 1980s onwards. The first examples discussed are the use of Roland´s early drum machines, the TR-808 and TR-909. Here, the focus is on the synthesised kick drum sound and how it enabled the production of base heavy club music. The second example discusses the praxis of sampling as it developed from the samplers in the early 1980s to present day DAW software. The focus is on how different ways of defining the status and cultural purpose of sound recording facilitated different aesthetic approaches to using such recordings in an artistic creative process. The third example analyses cases where artists themselves use digital and electronic tools to create new sound producing devices; not so much to develop and commodify new instruments, but as a focal point in the actual artistic expression. In all three of the examples discussed, the focus is on how novel possibilities in mediating sounds become part of a renegotiation of existing aesthetic ideals in music. It is not so much the novelty of the different tools themselves that are important, but how the new possibilities these tools enable become interpreted as strengthening or diverging from established aesthetic concepts of music.
Article
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This essay provides a model of how to critically read non-representational sound by attending carefully to its material elements. It presents a novel conceptualization of glitch music, an experimental medium of digital art comprised of the unpleasant sounds of technology malfunctioning. The analysis examines the representative songs of glitch artists Oval and their sonic articulation of the regenerative possibilities of failure. Although Oval largely considers conventional musical form to be tyrannical, its sound art simulates traditional musical elements such as rhythm, phrasing, and instrumentation, and transforms them into their respective glitch equivalents of metrical dissonance, repeated sound textures, and timbral experimentation, thereby altering digital malfunctions of sound into a sensual affective experience. Although music is theorized elsewhere to be persuasive because of its mobilization of emotions within the listener, the glitch art of Oval is suasory because it generates affective intensities that operate at an intercorporeal level of matter-energy. The songs of Oval update the modern directive of the Futurist sound movement to train the listener to accept a life surrounded by the sound of digital technology.
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With the American Dream seizing center stage, reality television competitions often feature disabled auditionees and their moving tales of overcoming adversity. Musical—and frequently singing—abilities potentially normalize and envoice contestants while silencing vital conversations about the exploitation, stigmatization, and corporate politics at work in these seductive narratives. How do chronicles of overcoming overcome consumers? And how might inspiration porn about disability disable beholders’ emotional, intellectual, and rhetorical faculties? As fans and scholars resist or succumb to the tearfulness induced by sentimental stories, they must chart tricky routes through the heady skepticism of Scylla and the naïve waterworks of Charybdis.
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Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction presents new insights into the study of musical rhythm through investigations of the micro-rhythmic design of groove-based music. The main purpose of the book is to investigate how technological mediation - in the age of digital music production tools - has influenced the design of rhythm at the micro level. Through close readings of technology-driven popular music genres, such as contemporary R&B, hip-hop, trip-hop, electro-pop, electronica, house and techno, as well as played folk music styles, the book sheds light on how investigations of the musical-temporal relationships of groove-based musics might be fruitfully pursued, in particular with regard to their micro-rhythmic features.
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The American popular music tradition of “jazzing the classics” has long stood at the intersection of discourses on high and low culture, commercialism, and jazz authenticity. Dance band arrangers during the 1930s and 1940s frequently evoked, parodied, or straddled these cultural debates through their manipulations of European classical repertoire. This article examines Swing Era arranging strategies in the context of prevailing racial essentialisms, conceptions of modernism, and notions of technical virtuosity. The legacy of African American freelance arranger Chappie Willet, and his arrangement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata, op. 13 (“Pathétique”) for the black dance band of Jimmie Lunceford, suggests that an account of the biography and artistic voice of the arranger is critical to understanding the motivations behind these hybrid musical works.
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The ‘return to beauty’ raises a number of questions for feminism. This paper begins by suggesting that there is no real reason for a feminist distrust either of beauty or of the discourses of beauty. The more difficult question is how to comprehend the bases of aesthetic judgement more generally, given feminist and other critiques of aesthetics and art criticism. The paper proposes looking at the cognate ‘value’ fields of ethics and political philosophy, in order to develop an approach to aesthetics that recognizes aesthetic criteria as grounded in community. It has been argued that uncertainty is the necessary basis for morality and for political judgement after the demise of ideologies of universalism. For the same reasons, an ‘aesthetics of uncertainty’ can be developed which refuses both the new universalism of the ‘return to beauty’ and the temptation to abandon principled criteria of judgement.
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When the compact disc was introduced in 1982, it was considered the first recording medium to vanish behind the audio information carried by it. Artists nevertheless discovered media-specific features unique to the CD. This paper focuses not so much on sound production (skipping CDs, glitches, etc.) as on musical form and listener participation in music for CD, which seems to have anticipated certain aspects of iPod culture.
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This bibliographic study lists more than 500 articles and books that address rock journalism and music criticism. The bibliography covers: general studies on rock journalism, key music commentators, venues for journalistic reports (newspapers, magazines, fanzines, and academic journals), and subjects of critical commentaries (recordings, concerts, books, interviews, biographies, and historical perspectives). The compilation illustrates the breadth of critical commentary available on contemporary music and recording artists.
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Linking the concept of high-fidelity reproduction to histories of representation, we suggest that the former contradicts widely held beliefs about the nature of representation throughout the 20th century. Through analyses of advertisements for certain sound reproduction technologies at different points in history, however, we propose that a shift is taking place that complicates the high-fidelity ideal. This ideal is complicated further still in the musical genre known as glitch, but the full extent of this problematization can only be apprehended through an analysis of the material ontology of the technology used to create this music. Digital technology thus only appears to surpass all previous standards of high-fidelity reproduction because it displaces a human perceptive faculty into the technological apparatus itself.
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