From Glitch Until Now
As the home computer started emerging in the 80’s digital tools for sound editing were soon to follow.13 In 1986 composer Trevor Wishart began leading the development of the Composers Desktop Project, dedicated to developing digital signal processing (DSP) tools to answer specific compositional needs.
These were softwares where you inputed a sound file and had a new, processed one rendered.14 In 1991, after a few precursory softwares, Pro Tools was released by Avid Design (formerly Digidesign). Pro Tools was the culmination of several years of development towards a real-time, ”tape-less” multi-track digital recording and editing environment.15
But the advent of the home computer did not only change the working process but the aesthetic experience of work itself. Kim Cascone writes that post-digital aesthetics derive from the experience of working within a digital environment with the sounds and sights of digital tools and their physical shells, as well as the failures of digital technology such as glitches and quantizations.
”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.”16
Indeed it makes sense that the post-digital aesthetic in music arrived when it did. In a development matched by all other areas of computing, Pro Tools represented a shift from signal processing software being created mainly by composer-developers themselves to serve their specific needs (and then often shared at no cost) to a world where large companies develop shiny products for the average user to purchase and use as intended, said user needing very little in terms of computer knowledge.
As mentioned in the quote above though, these new audio tools also gave artists such as Ryoji Ikeda, Oval or Aphex Twin the means to zoom in on the errors and cracks in the products themselves. This allowed them to create works that provided a constant reminder of the tools being just as faulty as the humans who developed them. This philosophy I believe to serve an equally important role today, as the tech industry gradually holds more and more societal power.
It also represented a change in perspective from foreground to background, something Cascone likens to the shift in cultural appreciation from portraits to landscape paintings in fine art.17 This was something that music did not explore on its own terms until Luigi Russolos industry-inspired musical devices and John Cages experiments with silence most popularly represented by the piece 4’33 (which I would contrast with earlier pastoral orchestra pieces, as they in my opinion simply used musical foreground to represent visual background). These philosophies I believe both needed to be re-invented in the digital era.
Where We Are Currently At
Building on earlier statements, it seems to me uncontroversial to say that the tech industry is continually providing its users with exceedingly glossy presentations of their products. Less and less we are allowed to see beneath the surface of the products presented to us. While the smoothness and in certain ways accessibility of the customer experience of digital technology has arguably been improved, it needs to be contextualized into a world where information and its tools of transmittance are increasingly dominating sources of power. The advancement of engineering has gone hand in hand with the decrease of insight the average consumer has into what happens inside their ”smart” computer hardware.
In this sense, glitch artists ended up losing ground in the battle for insight. While the glitch music of the late 20th and early 21st century often had what can, somewhat generalisingly, be described as a cold, logical aesthetic reflective of the functionalist interface design of early computer software and which could then be disrupted via the use of glitch, todays post-digital art will often rather deal with the uncannyness of corporate digital aesthetic, such as the unsettlingly liminal Walmart Metaverse shopping mall.
This art can reflect many perspectives, from naturalist horror at the artificial future ahead of us to the queer response of artists like Sophie or Arca, claiming that while the power is in the wrong hands this technology actually holds inherent tools of liberation and self-realization.
The main tool of electronic music creators is nowadays still the DAW. The capabilities of the tool have developed however, and now gives the possibility of advanced synthesis and signal processing. My practice of misuse will attempt to discover the modern possibilities equivalent to when artists like Oval were painting on CDs to make them skip. It intends to show what the modern digital instrument actually consists of, what its limits are and what it attempts to hide within the boundaries of conventional use.