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.