The Aesthetics of Failure: "Post-Digital" Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music

Author(s): Kim Cascone

Source: Computer Music Journal , Winter, 2000, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Winter, 2000), pp. 12-18
Published by: The MIT Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3681551

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Kim Cascone
anechoicmedia
The Aesthetics of
748 Edgemar Ave.
Pacifica, CA 94044, USA Failure: "Post-Digital"
kim@ anechoicmedia.com
http://www. anechoicmedia.com Tendencies in
Contemporary Computer
Music

The digital revolution is over. obtain a good, basic understanding of it. Univer-
sity computer music centers breed developers
- Nicholas Negroponte (1998) whose tools are shuttled around the Internet and
used to develop new music outside the university.
Over the past decade, the Internet has helped
Unfortunately, cultural exchange between non-
spawn a new movement in digital music. It is not academic artists and research centers has been
academically based, and for the most part the com-
lacking. The post-digital music that Max, SMS,
posers involved are self-taught. Music journalists
AudioSculpt, PD, and other such tools make pos-
occupy themselves inventing names for it, and
sible rarely makes it back to the ivory towers, yet
some have already taken root: glitch, microwave,
these non-academic composers anxiously await
DSP, sinecore, and microscopic music. These
new tools to make their way onto a multitude of
names evolved through a collection of decon- Web sites.
structive audio and visual techniques that allow
Even in the commercial software industry, the
artists to work beneath the previously impen-
marketing departments of most audio software
etrable veil of digital media. The Negroponte epi-
companies have not yet fully grasped the post-digi-
graph above inspired me to refer to this emergent
tal aesthetic; as a result, the more unusual tools
genre as "post-digital" because the revolutionary
emanate from developers who use their academic
period of the digital information age has surely
training to respond to personal creative needs.
passed. The tendrils of digital technology have in
This article is an attempt to provide feedback to
some way touched everyone. With electronic com-
both academic and commercial music software de-
merce now a natural part of the business fabric of
velopers by showing how current DSP tools are be-
the Western world and Hollywood cranking out
ing used by post-digital composers, affecting both
digital fluff by the gigabyte, the medium of digital
the form and content of contemporary "non-aca-
technology holds less fascination for composers in demic" electronic music.
and of itself. In this article, I will emphasize that
the medium is no longer the message; rather, spe-
cific tools themselves have become the message.
The Internet was originally created to accelerate The Aesthetics of Failure
the exchange of ideas and development of research
between academic centers, so it is perhaps no sur- It is failure that guides evolution;
prise that it is responsible for helping give birth to perfection offers no incentive for
new trends in computer music outside the con- improvement.
fines of academic think tanks. A non-academic
composer can search the Internet for tutorials and - Colson Whitehead (1999)
papers on any given aspect of computer music to
The "post-digital" aesthetic was developed in part
Computer Music Journal, 24:4, pp. 12-18, Winter 2000 as a result of the immersive experience of working
? 2000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. in environments suffused with digital technology:

12 Computer Music Journal

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computer fans whirring, laser printers churning Back to the Future
out documents, the sonification of user-interfaces,
and the muffled noise of hard drives. But more spe- Poets, painters, and composers sometimes walk a
cifically, it is from the "failure" of digital technol- fine line between madness and genius, and
ogy that this new work has emerged: glitches, throughout the ages they have used "devices"
bugs, application errors, system crashes, clipping, such as absinthe, narcotics, or mystical states to
aliasing, distortion, quantization noise, and even help make the jump from merely expanding their
the noise floor of computer sound cards are the perceptual boundaries to hoisting themselves into
raw materials composers seek to incorporate into territories beyond these boundaries. This trend to
their music.
seek out and explore new territories led to much
While technological failure is often controlled experimentation in the arts in the early part of the
and suppressed-its effects buried beneath the 20th century.
threshold of perception-most audio tools can When artists of the early 20th century turned their
zoom in on the errors, allowing composers to make senses to the world created by industrial progress,
them the focus of their work. Indeed, "failure" hasthey were forced to focus on the new and changing
become a prominent aesthetic in many of the arts landscape of what was considered "background."
in the late 20th century, reminding us that our
control of technology is an illusion, and revealing I now note that ordinarily I am concerned
digital tools to be only as perfect, precise, and effi- with, focus my attention upon, things or
cient as the humans who build them. New tech- "objects," the words on the page. But I now
niques are often discovered by accident or by the note that these are always situated within
failure of an intended technique or experiment. what begins to appear to me as a widening
field which ordinarily is a background from
I would only observe that in most high- which the "object" or thing stands out. I now
profile gigs, failure tends to be far more find by a purposeful act of attention that I
interesting to the audience than success. may turn to the field as field, and in the case
of vision I soon also discern that the field has
- David Zicarelli (1999)
a kind of boundary or limit, a horizon. This
There are many types of digital audio "failure." horizon always tends to "escape" me when I
Sometimes, it results in horrible noise, while other try to get at it; it "withdraws" always on the
times it can produce wondrous tapestries of sound. extreme fringe of the visual field. It retains a
(To more adventurous ears, these are quite often certain essentially enigmatic character.
the same.) When the German sound experimenters - Don Idhe (1976)
known as Oval started creating music in the early
1990s by painting small images on the underside of Concepts such as "detritus," "by-product," and
CDs to make them skip, they were using an aspect "background" (or "horizon") are important to con-
of "failure" in their work that revealed a sider when examining how the current post-digi-
subtextual layer embedded in the compact disc. tal movement started. When visual artists first
Oval's investigation of "failure" is not new. shifted their focus from foreground to background
Much work had previously been done in this area (for instance, from portraiture to landscape paint-
such as the optical soundtrack work of Laszlo ing), it helped to expand their perceptual bound-
Moholy-Nagy and Oskar Fischinger, as well as the aries, enabling them to capture the background's
vinyl record manipulations of John Cage and enigmatic character.
Christian Marclay, to name a few. What is new isThe basic composition of "background" is com-
prised of data we filter out to focus on our imme-
that ideas now travel at the speed of light and can
diate surroundings. The data hidden in our
spawn entire musical genres in a relatively short
period of time. perceptual "blind spot" contains worlds waiting to

Cascone 13

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be explored, if we choose to shift our focus there.selves never found their way into much of the music
Today's digital technology enables artists to ex- in the Futurists' time, they did manage to inspire
plore new territories for content by capturing and composers like Stravinsky and Ravel to incorporate
examining the area beyond the boundary of "nor- some of these types of sounds into their work.
mal" functions and uses of software. A few decades after the Futurists brought inciden-
tal noise to the foreground, John Cage would give
Although the lineage of post-digital music is com-
plex, there are two important and well-known pre- permission to all composers to use any sound in
composing music. At the 1952 debut of Cage's
cursors that helped frame its emergence: the Italian
Futurist movement at the beginning of the 20th 4'33", David Tudor opened the piano keyboard lid
century, and John Cage's composition 4'33" (1952). and sat for the duration indicated in the title, im-
Futurism was an attempt to reinvent life as it plicitly inviting the audience to listen to back-
was being reshaped by new technologies. The Ital- ground sounds, only closing and reopening the lid to
demarcate three movements. The idea for 4'33" was
ian Futurist painter Luigi Russolo was so inspired
by a 1913 orchestral performance of a composition
outlined in a lecture given by Cage at Vassar Col-
lege in 1948, entitled "A Composer's Confessions."
by Balilla Pratella that he wrote a manifesto, The
Art of Noises, in the form of a letter to Pratella.The following year, Cage saw the white paintings of
His manifesto and subsequent experiments with Robert Rauschenberg, and he saw in this an oppor-
intonarumori (noise intoners), which imitated tunity
ur- to keep pace with painting and push the
ban industrial sounds, transmitted a viral message stifled boundaries of modern music. Rauschenberg's
to future generations, resulting in Russolo's cur- white paintings combined chance, non-intention,
rent status as the "grandfather" of contemporaryand "minimalism" in one broad stroke, where the
"post-digital" music. The Futurists considered paintings
in- revealed the "changing play of light and
dustrial life a source of beauty, and for them it shadow and the presence of dust" (Kahn 1999).
provided an ongoing symphony. Car engines, ma- Rauschenberg's white paintings were a powerful
chines, factories, telephones, and electricity had catalyst that helped inspire Cage to remove all con-
straints on what was considered music. Every envi-
been in existence for only a short time, and the re-
sulting din was a rich palette for the Futurists toronment could be experienced in a completely new
use in their sound experiments. way-as music.
Of equal importance to Cage's "silent piece" was
The variety of noises is infinite. If today,
his realization that there is, in fact, no such thing as
when we have perhaps a thousand different
"silence"-that, as human beings, our sensory per-
machines, we can distinguish a thousand
ceptions occur against the background noise of our
different noises, tomorrow, as new machines
biological systems. His experience in an anechoic
multiply, we will be able to distinguish ten,
chamber at Harvard University prior to composing
twenty, or thirty thousand different noises, 4'33" shattered the belief that silence was obtainable
not merely in a simply imitative way, but to
and revealed that the state of "nothing" was a condi-
combine them according to our imagination.
tion filled with everything we filtered out. From
- Luigi Russolo (1913) then on, Cage strove to incorporate this revelation
into subsequent works by paying attention not only
This was probably the first time in history thatto sound objects, but also to their background.
sound artists shifted their focus from the foreground
of musical notes to the background of incidental
sound. Russolo and Ugo Piatti-who together con- Snap, Crackle, Glitch
structed the noise intoners-gave them descriptive
names such as "exploders," "roarers," "croakers,"
Fast-forwarding from the 1950s to the present, we
"thunderers," "bursters," "cracklers," "buzzers,"
skip over most of the electronic music of the 20th
and "scrapers." Although the intonarumori them-century, much of which has not, in my opinion, fo-

14 Computer Music Journal

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cused on expanding the ideas first explored by the A pair of Finnish producers called Pan Sonic-
Futurists and Cage. An emergent genre that con- then known as Panasonic, before a team of corpo-
sciously builds on these ideas is that which I have rate lawyers encouraged them to change their
termed "post-digital," but it shares many names, name-led one of the first forays into experimen-
as noted in the introduction, and I will refer to it tation in electronica. Mika Vainio, head architect
from here on out as glitch. The glitch genre arrived of the Pan Sonic sound, used handmade sine wave
on the back of the electronica movement, an um- oscillators and a collection of inexpensive effect
brella term for alternative, largely dance-based pedals and synthesizers to create a highly syn-
electronic music (including house, techno, electro, thetic, minimal, "hard-edged" sound. Their first
drum'n'bass, ambient) that has come into vogue in CD, titled Vakio, was released in the summer of
the past five years. Most of the work in this area is 1993, and was a sonic shockwave compared to the
released on labels peripherally associated with the more blissful strains of ambient-techno becoming
dance music market, and is therefore removed popular at that time. The Pan Sonic sound con-
from the contexts of academic consideration and jured stark, florescent, industrial landscapes; test-
acceptability that it might otherwise earn. Still, intones were pounded into submission until they
spite of this odd pairing of fashion and art music,squirted out low, throbbing drones and high-
the composers of glitch often draw their inspira- pitched stabs of sine waves. The record label
tion from the masters of 20th century music whoVainio founded, Stihk6 Records, released material
they feel best describe its lineage. 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
A Brief History of Glitch experimenting with CD-skipping techniques and
helped to create a new tendril of glitch-one of slow-
At some point in the early 1990s, techno musicmoving slabs of dense, flitting textures. Another
settled into a predictable, formulaic genre serving German group, which called itself Mouse on Mars,
a more or less aesthetically homogeneous market injected this glitch aesthetic into a more danceable
of DJs and dance music aficionados. Concomitant framework, resulting in gritty low-fidelity rhythmic
with this development was the rise of a peripherylayers warping in and out of one another.
of DJs and producers eager to expand the music's From the mid-1990s forward, the glitch aes-
tendrils into new areas. One can visualize techno thetic appeared in various sub-genres, including
as a large postmodern appropriation machine, as- drum'n'bass, drill'n'bass, and trip-hop. Artists
similating cultural references, tweaking them,such and as Aphex Twin, LTJ Bukem, Omni Trio,
then re-presenting them as tongue-in-cheek jokes. Wagon Christ, and Goldie were experimenting
DJs, fueled with samples from thrift store pur-with all sorts of manipulation in the digital do-
chases of obscure vinyl, managed to mix any main. Time-stretching vocals and reducing drum
source imaginable into sets played for more adven- loops to eight bits or less were some of the first
turous dance floors. Always trying to outdo one techniques used in creating artifacts and exposing
another, it was only a matter of time until DJs un- them as timbral content. The more experimental
earthed the history of electronic music in their side ar- of electronica was still growing and slowly es-
cheological thrift store digs. Once the door was tablishing a vocabulary.
opened to exploring the history of electronic mu- By the late 1990s, the glitch movement was keep-
sic, invoking its more notable composers cameing pace with the release of new features in music
into vogue. A handful of DJs and composers of software, and the movement began congealing into
electronica were suddenly familiar with the work a rudimentary form. A roster of artists was develop
of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Morton Subotnick, ing. and Japanese producer Ryoji Ikeda was one of the
John Cage, and their influence helped spawn the first artists other than Mika Vainio to gain expo-
glitch movement. sure for his stark, "bleepy" soundscapes. In con-

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trast to Vainio, Ikeda brought a serene quality of gies developed in academic computer music cen-
spirituality to glitch music. His first CD, entitled ters-and a distribution medium capable of shut-
+/-, was one of the first glitch releases to break new tling tools, ideas, and music between like-minded
ground in the delicate use of high frequencies and composers and engineers-the resultant glitch
short sounds that stab at listeners' ears, often leav- movement can be seen as a natural progression in
ing the audience with a feeling of tinnitus. electronic music. In this new music, the tools
Another artist who helped bridge the gap be- themselves have become the instruments, and the
tween delicate and damaging was Carsten Nicolai resulting sound is born of their use in ways unin-
(who records and performs under the name Noto). tended by their designers. Commonly referred to as
Nicolai is also a co-founder of Noton/Rastermusic, sound "mangling" or "crunching," composers are
a German label group that specializes in innova- now able to view music on a microscopic level.
tive digital music. In a similar fashion, Peter Curtis Roads coined the term microsound for all
Rehberg, Christian Fennesz, and the sound/Net art variants of granular and atomic methods of sound
project Farmers Manual are tightly associated with synthesis, and tools capable of operating at this mi-
the Mego label located in Vienna. Rehberg has the croscopic level are able to achieve these effects. Be-
distinction of having received one of only two cause the tools used in this style of music embody
honorary Ars Electronica awards in Digital Music advanced concepts of digital signal processing, their
for his contribution to electronic music. Over the usage by glitch artists tends to be based on experi-
past few years, the glitch movement has grown to mentation rather than empirical investigation. In
encompass dozens of artists who are defining new this fashion, unintended usage has become the sec-
vocabularies in digital media. Artists such as ond permission granted. It has been said that one
immedia, Taylor Deupree, Nobukazu Takemura, does not need advanced training to use digital sig-
Neina, Richard Chartier, Pimmon, *0, nal processing programs-just "mess around" until
Autopoieses, and T:un[k], to name just a few, con-
you obtain the desired result. Sometimes, not
stitute the second wave of sound hackers explor-knowing the theoretical operation of a tool can re-
ing the glitch aesthetic. sult in more interesting results by "thinking out-
There are many artists who have not been men-side of the box." As Bob Ostertag notes, "It appears
tioned here who contribute to pushing the bound-that the more technology is thrown at the problem,
aries of this movement. It is beyond the scope the
of more boring the results" (1998).
this article to go deeply into the evolution of
"I looked at my paper," said Cage. "Suddenly
glitch music, but I have included a discography at
I saw that the music, all the music, was already
the end of this article that will offer good starting
there." He conceived of a procedure which
points for the casual listener. would enable him to derive the details of his
music from the little glitches and
Power Tools imperfections which can be seen on sheets of
paper. It had symbolic as well as practical
value; it made the unwanted features of the
Computers have become the primary tools for
paper its most significant ones-there is not
creating and performing electronic music, while theeven a visual silence.
Internet has become a logical new distribution me-
dium. For the first time in history, creative output - David Revill (1999)
and the means of its distribution have been inextri-
cably linked. Our current sonic backgrounds have
dramatically changed since 4'33" was first per- New Music From New Tools
formed-and thus the means for navigating our sur-
roundings as well. In response to the radical Tools now aid composers in the deconstruction o
alteration of our hearing by the tools and technolo-digital files: exploring the sonic possibilities of a

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Photoshop file that displays an image of a flower, Discussion
trawling word processing documents in search of
coherent bytes of sound, using noise-reduction Electronica DJs typically view individual tracks as
software to analyze and process audio in ways that pieces that can be layered and mixed freely. This
the software designer never intended. Any selec- modular approach to creating new work from pre-
tion of algorithms can be interfaced to pass data existing materials forms the basis of electronic
back and forth, mapping effortlessly from one di- music composers' use of samples. Glitch, how-
mension into another. In this way, all data can be- ever, takes a more deconstructionist approach in
come fodder for sonic experimentation. that the tendency is to reduce work to a minimum
Composers of glitch music have gained their amount of information. Many glitch pieces reflect
technical knowledge through self-study, countless a stripped-down, anechoic, atomic use of sound,
hours deciphering software manuals, and probing and they typically last from one to three minutes.
Internet newsgroups for needed information. They But it seems this approach affects the listening
have used the Internet both as a tool for learning habits of electronica aficionados. I had the experi-
and as a method of distributing their work. Com- ence of hearing a popular sample CD playing in a
posers now need to know about file types, sample clothing boutique. The "atomic" parts, or samples,
rates, and bit resolution to optimize their work used in composing electronica from small modular
for the Internet. The artist completes a cultural pieces had become the whole. This is a clear indi-
feedback loop in the circuit of the Internet: artists cation that contemporary computer music has be-
download tools and information, develop ideas come fragmented, it is composed of stratified
based on that information, create work reflecting layers that intermingle and defer meaning until
those ideas with the appropriate tools, and then the listener takes an active role in the production
upload that work to a World Wide Web site where of meaning.
other artists can explore the ideas embedded in If glitch music is to advance past its initial stage
the work.
of blind experimentation, new tools must be built
The technical requirements for being a musi- with an educational bent in mind. That is, a tool
cian in the information age may be more rigorousshould possess multiple layers of abstraction that
than ever before, but-compared to the depth of allow novices to work at a simple level, stripping
university computer music studies-it is still away those layers as they gain mastery. In order to
rather light. Most of the tools being used today help better understand current trends in electronic
have a layer of abstraction that enables artists to music, the researchers in academic centers must
explore without demanding excessive technical keep abreast of these trends. Certainly, many of
knowledge. Tools like Reaktor, Max/MSP, their college students are familiar with the music
MetaSynth, Audiomulch, Crusher-X, and and can suggest pieces for listening. The compact
Soundhack are pressed into action, more often discs given in this article's reference list form a
than not with little care or regard for the techni- good starting point. More information can be ob-
cal details of DSP theory, and more as an aesthetic tained by reading some of the many electronic
wandering through the sounds that these modernmailing lists dedicated to electronica, such as the
tools can create.
microsound, idm, and wire lists. In this way, the
The medium is no longer the message in glitchgap can be bridged, and new ideas can flow more
music: the tool has become the message. The tech-
openly between commercial and academic sectors.
nique of exposing the minutiae of DSP errors and
artifacts for their own sonic value has helped fur- We therefore invite young musicians of
ther blur the boundaries of what is to be consid- talent to conduct a sustained observation of
ered music, but it has also forced us to also to all noises, in order to understand the various
examine our preconceptions of failure and detritus rhythms of which they are composed, their
more carefully. principal and secondary tones. By comparing

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 the various tones of noises with those of Discography
sounds, they will be convinced of the extent
to which the former exceeds the latter. This Christian Fennesz. 1999. +475637-165108. London:
Touch TO:40.
will afford not only an understanding, but
also a taste and passion for noises. Farmers Manual. 1999. No Backup. Vienna: Mego
MEGO008.
- Luigi Russolo (1913) Kim Cascone. 1999. cathodeFlower. Frankfurt: Mille
Plateaux/Ritornell RITO6.
Mika Vainio. 1997. Onko. London: Touch TO:34.
Mouse On Mars. 1995. Vulvaland. London: Too Pure 36.
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