Against the tyranny of musical form: glitch music, affect, and the sound of digital malfunction

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay provides a model of how to critically read non-representational sound by attending carefully to its material elements. It presents a novel conceptualization of glitch music, an experimental medium of digital art comprised of the unpleasant sounds of technology malfunctioning. The analysis examines the representative songs of glitch artists Oval and their sonic articulation of the regenerative possibilities of failure. Although Oval largely considers conventional musical form to be tyrannical, its sound art simulates traditional musical elements such as rhythm, phrasing, and instrumentation, and transforms them into their respective glitch equivalents of metrical dissonance, repeated sound textures, and timbral experimentation, thereby altering digital malfunctions of sound into a sensual affective experience. Although music is theorized elsewhere to be persuasive because of its mobilization of emotions within the listener, the glitch art of Oval is suasory because it generates affective intensities that operate at an intercorporeal level of matter-energy. The songs of Oval update the modern directive of the Futurist sound movement to train the listener to accept a life surrounded by the sound of digital technology.