The digital revolution
is over. |
|
— Nicholas
Negroponte (1998) |
Over the past decade, the Internet has helped spawn a new movement
in digital music. It is not academically based, and for the most
part the composers involved are self-taught. Music journalists
occupy themselves inventing names for it, and some have already
taken root: glitch, microwave, DSP, sinecore, and microscopic
music. These names evolved through a collection of deconstructive
audio and visual techniques that allow artists to work beneath
the previously impenetrable veil of digital media. The Negroponte
epigraph above inspired me to refer to this emergent genre as
"post-digital" because the revolutionary period of the
digital information age has surely passed. The tendrils of digital
technology have in some way touched everyone. With electronic
commerce now a natural part of the business fabric of the Western
world and Hollywood cranking out digital fluff by the gigabyte,
the medium of digital technology holds less fascination for composers
in and of itself. In this article, I will emphasize that the medium
is no longer the message; rather, specific tools themselves have
become the message.
The Internet was originally created to accelerate the exchange
of ideas and development of research between academic centers,
so it is perhaps no surprise that it is responsible for helping
give birth to new trends in computer music outside the confines
of academic think tanks. A non-academic composer can search the
Internet for tutorials and papers on any given aspect of computer
music to obtain a good, basic understanding of it. University
computer music centers breed developers whose tools are shuttled
around the Internet and used to develop new music outside the
university.
Unfortunately, cultural exchange between nonacademic
artists and research centers has been lacking. The post-digital
music that Max, SMS, AudioSculpt, PD, and other such tools make
possible rarely makes it back to the ivory towers, yet these non-academic
composers anxiously await new tools to make their way onto a multitude
of Web sites.
Even in the commercial software industry, the marketing
departments of most audio software companies have not yet fully
grasped the post-digital aesthetic; as a result, the more unusual
tools emanate from developers who use their academic training
to respond to personal creative needs. This article is an attempt
to provide feedback to both academic and commercial music software
developers by showing how current DSP tools are being used by
post-digital composers, affecting both the form and content of
contemporary “non-academic“ electronic music.
The Aesthetics of Failure
It is failure that
guides evolution; perfection offers no incentive for improvement. |
|
— Colson
Whitehead (1999) |
The "post-digital" aesthetic was developed in part as
a result of the immersive experience of working in environments
suffused with digital technology: computer fans whirring, laser
printers churning out documents, the sonification of user-interfaces,
and the muffled noise of hard drives. But more specifically, it
is from the "failure" of digital technology that this
new work has emerged: glitches, bugs, application errors, system
crashes, clipping, aliasing, distortion, quantization noise, and
even the noise floor of computer sound cards are the raw materials
composers seek to incorporate into their music.
While technological failure is often controlled and suppressed—its
effects buried beneath the threshold of perception—most
audio tools can zoom in on the errors, allowing composers to make
them the focus of their work. Indeed, “failure” has
become a prominent aesthetic in many of the arts in the late 20th
century, reminding us that our control of technology is an illusion,
and revealing digital tools to be only as perfect, precise, and
efficient as the humans who build them. New techniques are often
discovered by accident or by the failure of an intended technique
or experiment.
I would only observe
that in most highprofile gigs, failure tends to be far more
interesting to the audience than success. |
|
— David Zicarelli
(1999) |
There are many types of digital audio "failure." Sometimes,
it results in horrible noise, while other times it can produce
wondrous tapestries of sound. (To more adventurous ears, these
are quite often the same.) When the German sound experimenters
known as Oval started creating music in the early 1990s by painting
small images on the underside of CDs to make them skip, they were
using an aspect of “failure” in their work that revealed
a subtextual layer embedded in the compact disc. Oval’s
investigation of "failure" is not new. Much work had
previously been done in this area such as the optical soundtrack
work of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Oskar Fischinger, as well as the
vinyl record manipulations of John Cage and Christian Marclay,
to name a few. What is new is that ideas now travel at the speed
of light and can spawn entire musical genres in a relatively short
period of time.
Back to the Future
Poets, painters, and composers sometimes walk a fine line between
madness and genius, and throughout the ages they have used "devices"
such as absinthe, narcotics, or mystical states to help make the
jump from merely expanding their perceptual boundaries to hoisting
themselves into territories beyond these boundaries. This trend
to seek out and explore new territories led to much experimentation
in the arts in the early part of the 20th century.
When artists of the early 20th century turned their senses to
the world created by industrial progress, they were forced to
focus on the new and changing landscape of what was considered
"background."
I now note that ordinarily
I am concerned with, focus my attention upon, things or
"objects," the words on the page. But I now note
that these are always situated within what begins to appear
to me as a widening field which ordinarily is a background
from which the "object" or thing stands out. I
now find by a purposeful act of attention that I may turn
to the field as field, and in the case of vision I soon
also discern that the field has a kind of boundary or limit,
a horizon. This horizon always tends to "escape"
me when I try to get at it; it "withdraws" always
on the extreme fringe of the visual field. It retains a
certain essentially enigmatic character. |
|
— Don Idhe
(1976) |
Concepts such as "detritus," "by-product,"
and "background" (or "horizon") are important
to consider when examining how the current post-digital movement
started. When visual artists first shifted their focus from foreground
to background (for instance, from portraiture to landscape painting),
it helped to expand their perceptual boundaries, enabling them
to capture the background's enigmatic character.
The basic composition of "background" is comprised of
data we filter out to focus on our immediate surroundings. The
data hidden in our perceptual "blind spot" contains
worlds waiting to be explored, if we choose to shift our focus
there. Today’s digital technology enables artists to explore
new territories for content by capturing and examining the area
beyond the boundary of "normal" functions and uses of
software.
Although the lineage of post-digital music is complex, there are
two important and well-known precursors that helped frame its
emergence: the Italian Futurist movement at the beginning of the
20th century, and John Cage's composition 4'33"
(1952).
Futurism was an attempt to reinvent life as it was being reshaped
by new technologies. The Italian Futurist painter Luigi Russolo
was so inspired
by a 1913 orchestral performance of a composition by Balilla Pratella
that he wrote a manifesto, The Art of Noises, in the form of a
letter to Pratella. His manifesto and subsequent experiments with
intonarumori (noise intoners), which imitated urban industrial
sounds, transmitted a viral message to future generations, resulting
in Russolo’s current status as the "grandfather"
of contemporary "post-digital" music. The Futurists
considered industrial life a source of beauty, and for them it
provided an ongoing symphony. Car engines, machines, factories,
telephones, and electricity had been in existence for only a short
time, and the resulting din was a rich palette for the Futurists
to use in their sound experiments.
The variety of noises
is infinite. If today, when we have perhaps a thousand different
machines, we can distinguish a thousand different noises,
tomorrow, as new machines multiply, we will be able to distinguish
ten, twenty, or thirty thousand different noises, not merely
in a simply imitative way, but to combine them according
to our imagination. |
|
— Luigi Russolo
(1913) |
This was probably the first time in history that sound artists
shifted their focus from the foreground of musical notes to the
background of incidental sound. Russolo and Ugo Piatti—who
together constructed the noise intoners—gave them descriptive
names such as "exploders," "roarers,""croakers,""thunderers,"
"bursters," "cracklers,""buzzers,"
and "scrapers." Although the intonarumori themselves
never found their way into much of the music in the Futurists’
time, they did manage to inspire composers like Stravinsky and
Ravel to incorporate some of these types of sounds into their
work. A few decades after the Futurists brought incidental noise
to the foreground, John Cage would give permission to all composers
to use any sound in composing music. At the 1952 debut of Cage's
4'33", David Tudor opened the piano keyboard lid
and sat for the duration indicated in the title, implicitly inviting
the audience to listen to background sounds, only closing and
reopening the lid to demarcate three movements. The idea for 4'33"
was outlined in a lecture given by Cage at Vassar College in 1948,
entitled "A Composer's Confessions." The following year,
Cage saw the white paintings of Robert Rauschenberg, and he saw
in this an opportunity to keep pace with painting and push the
stifled boundaries of modern music. Rauschenberg’s white
paintings combined chance, non-intention, and "minimalism"
in one broad stroke, where the paintings revealed the "changing
play of light and shadow and the presence of dust" (Kahn
1999). Rauschenberg's white paintings were a powerful catalyst
that helped inspire Cage to remove all constraints on what was
considered music. Every environment could be experienced in a
completely new way—as music.
Of equal importance to Cage's "silent piece" was his
realization that there is, in fact, no such thing as "silence"—that,
as human beings, our sensory perceptions
occur against the background noise of our biological systems.
His experience in an anechoic chamber at Harvard University prior
to composing 4'33" shattered the belief that silence
was obtainable and revealed that the state of "nothing"
was a condition filled with everything we filtered out. From then
on, Cage strove to incorporate this revelation into subsequent
works by paying attention not only to sound objects, but also
to their background.
Snap, Crackle, Glitch
Fast-forwarding from the 1950s to the present, we skip over most
of the electronic music of the 20th century, much of which has
not, in my opinion, focused on expanding the ideas first explored
by the Futurists and Cage. An emergent genre that consciously
builds on these ideas is that which I have termed "post-digital,"
but it shares many names, as noted in the introduction, and I
will refer to it from here on out as glitch. The glitch genre
arrivedon the back of the electronica movement, an umbrella term
for alternative, largely dance-based electronic music (including
house, techno, electro, drum'n'bass, ambient) that has come into
vogue in the past five years. Most of the work in this area is
released on labels peripherally associated with the dance music
market, and is therefore removed from the contexts of academic
consideration and acceptability that it might otherwise earn.
Still, in spite of this odd pairing of fashion and art music,
the composers of glitch often draw their inspiration from the
masters of 20th century music who they feel best describe its
lineage.
A Brief History of Glitch
At some point in the early 1990s, techno music settled into a
predictable, formulaic genre serving a more or less aesthetically
homogeneous market of DJs and dance music aficionados. Concomitant
with this development was the rise of a periphery of DJs and producers
eager to expand the music's tendrils into new areas. One can visualize
techno as a large postmodern appropriation machine, assimilating
cultural references, tweaking them, and then re-presenting them
as tongue-in-cheek jokes. DJs, fueled with samples from thrift
store purchases of obscure vinyl, managed to mix any source imaginable
into sets played for more adventurous dance floors. Always trying
to outdo one another, it was only a matter of time until DJs unearthed
the history of electronic music in their archeological thrift
store digs. Once the door was opened to exploring the history
of electronic music, invoking its more notable composers came
into vogue. A handful of DJs and composers of electronica were
suddenly familiar with the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Morton
Subotnick, and John Cage, and their influence helped spawn the
glitch movement.
A pair of Finnish producers called Pan Sonic— then known
as Panasonic, before a team of corporate lawyers encouraged them
to change their name—led one of the first forays into experimentation
in electronica. Mika Vainio, head architect of the Pan Sonic sound,
used handmade sine wave oscillators and a collection of inexpensive
effect pedals and synthesizers to create a highly synthetic, minimal,
“hard-edged” sound. Their first CD, titled Vakio,
was released in the summer of 1993, and was a sonic shockwave
compared to the more blissful strains of ambient-techno becoming
popular at that time. The Pan Sonic sound conjured stark, florescent,
industrial landscapes; testtones were pounded into submission
until they squirted out low, throbbing drones and highpitched
stabs of sine waves. The record label Vainio founded, Sähkö
Records, released material by a growing catalog of artists, most
of it in the same synthetic, stripped-down, minimal vein.
As discussed earlier, the German project Oval was experimenting
with CD-skipping techniques and helped to create a new tendril
of glitch—one of slowmoving slabs of dense, flitting textures.
Another German group, which called itself Mouse on Mars, injected
this glitch aesthetic into a more danceable framework, resulting
in gritty low-fidelity rhythmic layers warping in and out of one
another. From the mid-1990s forward, the glitch aesthetic appeared
in various sub-genres, including drum'n'bass, drill'n'bass, and
trip-hop. Artists such as Aphex Twin, LTJ Bukem, Omni Trio, Wagon
Christ, and Goldie were experimenting with all sorts of manipulation
in the digital domain. Time-stretching vocals and reducing drum
loops to eight bits or less were some of the first techniques
used in creating artifacts and exposing them as timbral content.
The more experimental side of electronica was still growing and
slowly establishing a vocabulary.
By the late 1990s, the glitch movement was keeping pace with the
release of new features in music software, and the movement began
congealing into a rudimentary form. A roster of artists was developing.
Japanese producer Ryoji Ikeda was one of the first artists other
than Mika Vainio to gain exposure for his stark, "bleepy"
soundscapes. In contrast to Vainio, Ikeda brought a serene quality
of spirituality to glitch music. His first CD, entitled +/–,
was one of the first glitch releases to break new ground in the
delicate use of high frequencies and short sounds that stab at
listeners' ears, often leaving the audience with a feeling of
tinnitus.
Another artist who helped bridge the gap between delicate and
damaging was Carsten Nicolai (who records and performs under the
name Noto). Nicolai is also a co-founder of Noton/Rastermusic,
a German label group that specializes in innovative digital music.
In a similar fashion, Peter Rehberg, Christian Fennesz, and the
sound/Net art project Farmers Manual are tightly associated with
the Mego label located in Vienna. Rehberg has the distinction
of having received one of only two honorary Ars Electronica awards
in Digital Music for his contribution to electronic music. Over
the past few years, the glitch movement has grown to encompass
dozens of artists who are defining new vocabularies in digital
media. Artists such as immedia, Taylor Deupree, Nobukazu Takemura,
Neina, Richard Chartier, Pimmon, *0, Autopoieses, and T:un[k],
to name just a few, constitute the second wave of sound hackers
exploring the glitch aesthetic.
There are many artists who have not been mentioned here who contribute
to pushing the boundaries of this movement. It is beyond the scope
of this article to go deeply into the evolution of glitch music,
but I have included a discography at the end of this article that
will offer good starting points for the casual listener.
Power Tools
Computers have become the primary tools for creating and performing
electronic music, while the Internet has become a logical new
distribution medium. For the first time in history, creative output
and the means of its distribution have been inextricably linked.
Our current sonic backgrounds have dramatically changed since
4'33" was first performed —and thus the means
for navigating our surroundings as well. In response to the radical
alteration of our hearing by the tools and technologies developed
in academic computer music centers - and a distribution medium
capable of shuttling tools, ideas, and music between like-minded
composers and engineers- the resultant glitch movement can be
seen as a natural progression in electronic music. In this new
music, the tools themselves have become the instruments, and the
resulting sound is born of their use in ways unintended by their
designers. Commonly referred to as sound "mangling"
or "crunching," composers are now able to view music
on a microscopic level. Curtis Roads coined the term microsound
for all variants of granular and atomic methods of sound synthesis,
and tools capable of operating at this microscopic level are able
to achieve these effects. Because the tools used in this style
of music embody advanced concepts of digital signal processing,
their usage by glitch artists tends to be based on experimentation
rather than empirical investigation. In this fashion, unintended
usage has become the second permission granted. It has been said
that one does not need advanced training to use digital signal
processing programs —just "mess around" until
you obtain the desired result. Sometimes, not knowing the theoretical
operation of a tool can result in more interesting results by
"thinking outside of the box." As Bob Ostertag notes,
"It appears that the more technology is thrown at the problem,
the more boring the results" (1998).
"I looked at
my paper," said Cage. "Suddenly I saw that the
music, all the music, was already there." He conceived
of a procedure which would enable him to derive the details
of his music from the little glitches and imperfections
which can be seen on sheets of paper. It had symbolic as
well as practical value; it made the unwanted features of
the paper its most significant ones—there is not even
a visual silence. |
|
— David Revill
(1999) |
New Music From New Tools
Tools now aid composers in the deconstruction of digital files:
exploring the sonic possibilities of a Photoshop file that displays
an image of a flower, trawling word processing documents in search
of coherent bytes of sound, using noise-reduction software to
analyze and process audio in ways that the software designer never
intended. Any selection of algorithms can be interfaced to pass
data back and forth, mapping effortlessly from one dimension into
another. In this way, all data can become fodder for sonic experimentation.
Composers of glitch music have gained their technical knowledge
through self-study, countless hours deciphering software manuals,
and probing Internet newsgroups for needed information. They have
used the Internet both as a tool for learning and as a method
of distributing their work. Composers now need to know about file
types, sample rates, and bit resolution to optimize their work
for the Internet. The artist completes a cultural feedback loop
in the circuit of the Internet: artists download tools and information,
develop ideas based on that information, create work reflecting
those ideas with the appropriate tools, and then upload that work
to a World Wide Web site where other artists can explore the ideas
embedded in the work.
The technical requirements for being a musician in the information
age may be more rigorous than ever before, but—compared
to the depth of university computer music studies–it is
still rather light. Most of the tools being used today have a
layer of abstraction that enables artists to explore without demanding
excessive technical knowledge. Tools like Reaktor, Max/MSP, MetaSynth,
Audiomulch, Crusher-X, and Soundhack are pressed into action,
more often than not with little care or regard for the technical
details of DSP theory, and more as an aesthetic wandering through
the sounds that these modern tools can create.
The medium is no longer the message in glitch music: the tool
has become the message. The technique of exposing the minutiae
of DSP errors and artifacts for their own sonic value has helped
further blur the boundaries of what is to be considered music,
but it has also forced us to also to examine our preconceptions
of failure and detritus more carefully.
Discussion
Electronica DJs typically view individual tracks as pieces that
can be layered and mixed freely. This modular approach to creating
new work from preexisting materials forms the basis of electronic
music composers' use of samples. Glitch, however, takes a more
deconstructionist approach in that the tendency is to reduce work
to a minimum amount of information. Many glitch pieces reflect
a stripped-down, anechoic, atomic use of sound, and they typically
last from one to three minutes. But it seems this approach affects
the listening habits of electronica aficionados. I had the experience
of hearing a popular sample CD playing in a clothing boutique.
The "atomic" parts, or samples, used in composing electronica
from small modular pieces had become the whole. This is a clear
indication that contemporary computer music has become fragmented,
it is composed of stratified layers that intermingle and defer
meaning until the listener takes an active role in the production
of meaning.
If glitch music is to advance past its initial stage of blind
experimentation, new tools must be built with an educational bent
in mind. That is, a tool should possess multiple layers of abstraction
that allow novices to work at a simple level, stripping away those
layers as they gain mastery. In order to help better understand
current trends in electronic music, the researchers in academic
centers must keep abreast of these trends. Certainly, many of
their college students are familiar with the music and can suggest
pieces for listening. The compact discs given in this article’s
reference list form a good starting point. More information can
be obtained by reading some of the many electronic mailing lists
dedicated to electronica, such as the microsound, idm, and wire
lists. In this way, the gap can be bridged, and new ideas can
flow more openly between commercial and academic sectors.
We therefore invite
young musicians of talent to conduct a sustained observation
of all noises, in order to understand the various rhythms
of which they are composed, their principal and secondary
tones. By comparing the various tones of noises with those
of sounds, they will be convinced of the extent to which
the former exceeds the latter. This will afford not only
an understanding, but also a taste and passion for noises. |
|
— Luigi Russolo
(1913) |
References |
Cage, J. 1952. 4'33". Published c. 1960. New York:
Henmar Press
Idhe, D. 1976. Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of
Sound. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press
Kahn, D. 1999. Noise, Water, Meat. Cambridge, Massachusetts:
MIT Press
Negroponte, N. 1998. "Beyond Digital." Wired
6(12)
Ostertag, B. 1998. "Why Computer Music Sucks."
Available online at http://www.l-m-c.org.uk/texts/ostertag.html
Revill, D. 1992. The Roaring Silence. John Cage: A Life.
New York: Arcade Publishing
Russolo, L. 1987. The Art of Noises. New York: Pendragon
Press. (Originally published in 1913.)
Whitehead, C. 1999. The Intuitionist. New York: Anchor
Books
|
|
Discography |
Christian Fennesz. 1999. +475637–165108. London:Touch
TO:40
Farmers Manual. 1999. No Backup. Vienna: Mego MEGO008
Kim Cascone. 1999. cathodeFlower. Frankfurt: Mille Plateaux/Ritornell
RIT06
Mika Vainio. 1997. Onko. London: Touch TO:34
Mouse On Mars. 1995. Vulvaland. London: Too Pure 36
Neina. 1999. Formed Verse. Frankfurt: Mille Plateaux MPCD72
Nosei Sakata and Richard Chartier. 1999. *0/rc. Brooklyn:
12K 12K.1006
Noto. 1998. Kerne. Bad Honnef: Plate Lunch PL04
Oval. 1994. Systemische. Frankfurt: Mille Plateaux MPCD9
Pimmon. 1999. Waves and Particles. Tokyo: Meme MEME015CD
Pita. 1999. Seven Tons for Free. Osaka: Digital Narcis MEGO009
Ryoji Ikeda. 1996. +/–. London: Touch TO:30
Various Artists. 1999. Microscopic Sound. New York: Caipirinha
Music CAI2021-2
Various Artists. 2000. blueCubism. Osaka: Digital Narcis
DNCD007
Various Artists. 2000. Clicks and Cuts. Frankfurt: Mille
Plateaux MPCD079 |
This article was originally
published in Computer
Music Journal 24:4, pp. 12-18, Winter 2000 |
copyright Massachusetts
Institute of Technology |
Reprinted by permission |
Kim
Cascone is formally trained in electronic music at the
Berklee College of Music and the New School in New York
City. He has worked on David Lynch's Twin Peaks and Wild
at Heart as Assistant Music Editor as well as as Sound Designer
and Composer for Thomas Dolby's company Headspace. Founder
of Silent Records (1986) and a co-founder of the
microsound list. Cascone has released over 25 albums
of electronic music on Silent, Sub Rosa, Mille Plateaux,
Anechoic and 12k. His past work experience also include
performances/lectures at the Podewil (Germany), Musée
d’Art Moderne (Luxembourg), Tate Modern (London),
Leeds Film Festival (UK) as well as contributing articles
in Computer Music Journal (MIT Press), Artbyte Magazine,
SoundCultures and Parachute Journal. |
|