Glitch and Aesthetics: can digital error be musical?
Musical and digital, two worlds,
which are intertwined so much, that if asked somebody, who are a stranger to
these two on how music is created, he just blurted out - a computer. Nowadays not
a single musical or should I say the sound itself development process cannot be
completed without "digital assistance" not being incorporated in that
process. So can digital error be musical? I would say easy to tell, hard to
explain. For me it seems like this question has a couple of different
approaches. For this reason it seems like it is more a discussion than a
question.
As my object of discussion I
would like to choose electronic music. To be more accurate, I would like to
talk about electronic music creation process and the perception of it. As long
as it is a discussion, I have decided to choose two different directions for
this discussion that I have in my mind.
It would be the technical side of the process and the other one - deeper
and interpreted much more broadly - the philosophical side.
I Would like to start off simply
by saying that digital error definitely can be musical with a couple of
contrary thoughts in my mind. I think that it depends from what point of view
you look at this matter and how exactly
the meaning of digital error is understood. For example, if we would say that
in creation process this error is an act of deviating from an accepted code, we
would say that in this case a mistake or a digital error cannot be musical. Why?
Because we look at the error in the frame of a technical side, where the basis regulations
are strong and unquestionable. I mean it is already decided by that regulations
that it is a mistake and it must be fixed or deleted, otherwise it will be unaesthetic
or so called bad music. To be more
precise, I would like to give an example.
The quantization process. The
purpose of quantization in music processing is to provide a more beat-accurate
timing of sounds. It would be the most common digital error in creation process
not to quantize recorded sound. If we take, for example, MIDI (musical
instrument digital interface) track as a piece of sound - without proper
quantization it will not be musical. Inordinate MIDI
itself becomes unmusical or we can say - inharmonious, so in this scenario
quantization is a necessity for beat harmony. Maybe for many listeners slight
deflection from the tact will not make any difference, sometimes they do not
even notice the error, but for sensitive producers ear the sound without
perfect harmony is unmusical. In short, what I was trying to say is, that there
is no option the digital error to be musical, if that error is the basis of a
musical product. In this case it would be dissonant base line.
Other bad properties like mixing
out of the key, inappropriate speed of a track, ear-disturbing effects or
strange extraneous noises which is off the point can also be referred as a
digital errors in a whole track, which definitely wont make it more musical.
But is it really?
Although I am a fan of a house
music and techno, which, I think, is the music styles of order and aesthetics,
but deflections of a harmony or a strange erroneous ambient sounds (we might also
call them digital errors) unless it is
not a basis or the main beat line, but incorporated in a basis of a creation,
can make the whole creation even more musical. By the way what exactly is
digital error and how we decide that it is not musical? Or how we decide that
it is musical? The proposition that digital error can be musical is a fact, but,
in my opinion, it is very relative. Maybe this digital error in some cases
sounds perfectly fine. How do we know it is even an error ? I mean on what
characteristics do it share which give it this status? Is it established norms
in musical world? Is it structural aesthetics? Sound aesthetics? Generally
aesthetics as a separate branch of a philosophy science is also very relative.
There are a lot of issues concerning the aesthetics of music include lyricism,
harmony, hypnotism, emotiveness, temporal dynamics, resonance and playfulness.
All of them can vary from point to point.
I think everyone who makes music has
a right to decide by his own is it musical or unmusical. As in art, as well as
in music as a branch of an art exists the different levels of perception. Like
Malevich's "Suprematist Composition" painting which is worth 60
million dollars. For some people it seems like it is the unique masterpiece, for
some it's more like a five year old kid scrawl. In some cases in music is the
same, because the sound also known as frequencies which are raging from 16 to
20000 vibrations per seconds can be heard and processed by our brain differently
from each other. So in sound creation process, no matter if it is error - a
scratch, a noise, a skip or whatever which makes it a frequency that can be
heard by human ear, should be left for human, as a thinking, circumspect person
to decide is that frequency musical or
not, but not to decide for him by the established aesthetical norms. For
someone digital error might sound really attractive, for someone else it might
be a total anomaly. After all the process of sound extraction and manipulation
is very individual process, which result can be understood completely
different. Especially now, when electronic music is kind of based on
experimenting with everything that can be heard, including all the musical deflections.
By experimenting with digital errors, in other words - abnormal or erroneous
sounds, you can create something special, something flawless, your own unique
sound, which can make the whole style sound in a new way. I mean, how the new
sound is born, which later on becomes producer's sticker? It is by
experimenting, manipulating or distorting the sound.
The example that a music style
can be based on digital faults is Glitch - a style of electronic music emerged
in the late 1990s. Sources of glitch sound material are usually malfunctioning
or abused record audio devices or digital electronics, such as cd skipping,
electric hum, digital distortion, bit rate reduction, hardware noise, software
bugs, crashes and system errors. The idea of a style is to create harmony and
playfulness simply from digital errors and it is called music.
In conclusion I would like to
repeat myself, that digital error can be musical, unless it is not a basis or I
might say a foundation or a baseline of a production. Also we should not be
judging a digital error as unmusical only because it's an error. There are
plenty of different musical styles and within these styles lies their own aesthetics
and within these aesthetics lies their own provisions and these provisions can vary
because it might be seen as the senses, emotions, intellectual opinions,
culture, preferences, values subconscious behavior, conscious decision,
training, instinct or some complex combination of these, depending on exactly
which theory one employs.
Thank you.
