As Torben Sangild outlines in Glitch: The Beauty of Malfunction, glitch art celebrates the unintended and unexpected, the malfunction as a creative force. Emerging in the 1990s, the glitch movement in digital music, with earlier roots in tape-based phase experiments by artists like Steve Reich and Brian Eno — himself a proponent of graphic notation — offers a paradigm for embracing error as an aesthetic choice. Sangild highlights how glitches, by disrupting the smooth functioning of a system, reveal its inner workings, its underlying mechanics, and its inherent fragility. "Glitch displays the fragility and vulnerability of technology”, he observes, adding that “It points to the dialectic moments of irrationality embedded in rational computers. (...) And rationality is not just about following rules. There is something irrational about following rules slavishly" (Sangild 2004, 268-269). Indeed, while creativity arises largely through structured recombination, true novelty requires some form of interruption. When applied to algorithmic performance, this approach could involve introducing intentional disruptions or errors into the deterministic flow of the algorithm, thereby creating a space for spontaneity. Just as graphic musical notation seeks to expand the boundaries of musical expression by shifting the interpretive agency from prescriptive symbols to open-ended structures, so can glitch introduce an aesthetics of indeterminacy into algorithmic interpretation. Rather than a subversion of the algorithm, error represents a natural extension of it.
A view contemporary with many of the composers whose works we examined previously may be found in the work of Dick Higgins, whose early reflections on computational art emphasize the potential of machines not only to execute but also to inspire creativity (Higgins 1968). Rethinking the role of error and system constraints allows algorithms to function as co-creators rather than mere executors. In this sense, glitch allows for a kind of artificial agency that can enrich the deterministic models of algorithmic interpretation outlined in the preceding section. By introducing allowances for error — through pseudo-randomisation, disruptions in predefined paths, intentional breaches of the rules, or other avenues of creative vandalism — the algorithmic process may be modified, repurposed or wholly broken, allowing it to transcend execution to explore new creative possibilities. Rather than simulating human indeterminacy, this reframes the exercise as a dialogue between composer, system, and performer. The mistake becomes a means of exploration in its own right, one which introduces “fuzzy states … involving new processes of quantification” inherent to the algorithmic mode of prehension. (Parisi 2013, 97)
A Note on the Nature of Glitch
We have seen that glitch — error, malfunction, regression, unintentionality, recursion — can prove to be a productive instrument in conceptualising an interpretive algorithmic agency. Yet an unresolved paradox remains: is glitch something we can will into being, or does it preclude premeditation by its very nature? In seeking to instrumentalise glitch, do we risk irrevocably distorting the very conditions that make it meaningful? The ontological purist may argue that its essence lies in the unpredictability of its emergence from malfunction. To retain its authenticity, it must remain outside of our control. In phenomenological terms, however, even the pseudo-random approaches we may readily employ in implementing glitch principles within a digital system could be perceptually indistinguishable from "true" glitch.
At the level of perception, the distinction loses significance; what matters is the effect, the disruption, and the creative potential that the idea of glitch unlocks. Even deliberate, calculated systemic sabotage has the potential to result in wholly unexpected outcomes. Still, glitch is only glitch insofar as it is unexpected to both listener and performer. By its very nature, it excludes the possibility of acclimatisation, remaining outside any resolved forms or structures.
Creating the necessary liberty to instigate the unintended is to an extent an aestheticisation of glitch, to be differentiated from its imitation, which concentrates on reproducing its sonic effects. The skip of a scratched disk, an overloaded CPU, a sound driver crashing, a dispersion of pixels — all of these produce distinctive artefacts, and can be sampled, combined, twisted and composed with, yet are rarely taken for the real thing when heard in a musical context. It is important not to conflate the two; the essence of glitch as a productive device that confers systemic agency lies in its emergence from the logic of the very same system, whether intentionally placed in it or not, not in the sonic effects normally associated with it, which can comfortably exist independently of it.
This leads to another critical question: where does glitch reside? Does it exist solely in the malfunctioning system, or is it brought into being by the perception of the listener? In other words, we are confronted with glitch as a phenomenon in and of itself in the world/system, as well as something that belongs inherently to the sphere of interpretation. In the latter, the listener assumes the role of a performer in their own right, actively engaging with, interpreting and ordering the artefacts of glitch. This expands the conceptual space of interpretation and appropriation, positioning glitch not as an isolated event but as a dynamic interaction between composer, performer and audience, a distributed form of creativity both within the musical-performative space of the score, and as a prehensile mode in its own right.
This understanding relates closely to the embodied nature of listening itself. Listening is not a passive act but a layered and multifaceted process, deeply tied to the body and the environment. By introducing perceptual irregularities, glitch challenges the listener’s expectations; it creates a space for new meanings to emerge, a space where interpretation is no longer fixed but continually evolving. This evolution is decidedly circular: a momentary destabilisation leading to acclimatisation, whose establishment is then subject to inversion, re-establishment, and so on. In this, glitch goes between being there and then not, designated always by that which preceded and followed it, never by itself. It is ultimately a non-thing that nonetheless exists within and emerges from the logic of the system, rendered substantial by our contextual perception. In this it is quite like the score in which it is embedded; meaning arises not from a single event but from a set of continuously evolving relationships.
Conclusion
In the tension between determinism and malfunction, every interpretation is provisional.
The graphic score already gestures towards this openness: an attempt to codify sound while highlighting and expanding the interstices of the composition, formally articulating the performer’s participation in the compositional process. By translating the visual score into an algorithmic reading, however, we introduce a different constraint — one that demands every interpretive rule be made explicit. Glitch intervenes at this threshold, reinterpreting from within the logic of computation what is lost in the process of codification. In this light, the algorithm moves beyond its role as a mere translation layer between graphic score and sound, beginning to act as a performer in its own right.
In reflecting on these systems, we are also reflecting on the shifting boundaries between composer, performer, instrument, and listener; on how we negotiate authorship and agency with the tools that increasingly co-create our music. If algorithmic systems (and the points of failure embedded in them) can complement traditional performance practices, they also challenge and redefine them.
Your browser does not meet the minimum requirements to view this website. The browsers listed below are compatible. If you do not have any of these browsers, click on the icon to download the desired browser.
