Glitch Music and Instrumentality: Laptop Performance in the Digital Age

Glitch Music and Instrumentality

There is nothing intrinsically musical about a laptop computer, yet portable computers have become increasingly popular for performing music over the past two decades. Computers once powerful enough for music creation were restricted to universities and professional studios. Today, computers are as accessible as traditional instruments, opening electronic music to people without formal training through graphic interfaces.

This commentary examines the relationship between instrumentality and the performance and composition of electronic music by comparing traditional instrumental performance with the modern practice of laptop performance. The topic of imperfection is discussed alongside how certain 'errors' have become widely accepted, even giving rise to entire genres. The evolution of glitch music from a genre entirely dependent on computers for creation to one that incorporates traditional instruments and performance is explored.

The compositional styles of Alva Noto's early solo work and his later collaborations, particularly with the Ensemble Modern and pianist-composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, are compared. The purpose is to examine whether incorporating instruments or notions of instrumentality has shifted Alva Noto's approach from a visually led, cymatic process to a more sonically led one. This comparison serves as a case study for my own compositions, some of which deliberately explore traditional instrumental techniques while others focus on virtuosity within Ableton Live.

Glitch Music and Instrumentality

Glitch music represents the 'sound of the system'—the sound of digital hardware malfunctioning, captured and sequenced by self-taught composers and performed by self-taught performers. This diversity of approaches is captured in Kim Cascone's description of the genre in his article 'The Aesthetics of Failure', where he states that 'the medium is no longer the message; rather, specific tools have become the message.' While dubstep is instantly recognisable through its signature rhythm and bass lines, glitch resists easy categorisation. Despite certain generic sonic similarities between tracks, glitch is essentially governed by process and a specific method of creating sonic material—CDs scratched or painted and re-recorded, image files opened in sound programs to exploit raw data, or digital clicks drawn sample by sample. Glitch music does not rely heavily on effects but lays the machine's interior bare, uncompromising and unapologetic.

Glitch music benefits enormously from being acousmatic—sequences of clicks produced by alternating between minimum and maximum values in quick succession, with ultra-dry production that bypasses essential circuitry and projects directly into the brain. Glitch is literally the sound of a failing computer system, edited, organised, and transmitted through speakers. This genre could not exist through any other means—it is the quintessential digital music.

A particular concern is glitch music's ambiguous role as either a commercial product or academic pursuit. The genre emerged as an offshoot from the broader electronica movement, separated from commercialism by heavy artistic and philosophical influence, evident even in the naming of the label Mille Plateaux after Deleuze and Guattari's work. While glitch is clearly inspired to some degree by dance music, a glitch composer is more likely to cite Luigi Russolo or Steve Reich as influences because of the genre's emphasis on patterned repetition of noise-based signals.

This creates a reception problem. Most glitch music is performed in formal settings—art galleries or university laptop ensembles—catering to musically knowledgeable audiences who understand the process and derive cultural benefit. Yet the repetitive structure and aggressive percussive timbre of glitch music recall popular dance music. The glitch community is rhizomatic in structure, which provides creative freedom but also alienates a popular music audience hesitant to invest time educating themselves about such a complex genre. If any portion of this larger audience is to be won over, the responsibility of educating them rests with the composer, who must work within accepted modes of reception to educate and eventually subvert currently accepted ideas.

Although glitch music originally rejected notions of instrumentality, several glitch artists, notably Alva Noto, have recently begun working with instrumental ensembles, exploring the limits of both instruments and computer resources. To view the laptop as an instrument in such an ensemble requires understanding what an instrument is: 'the limits of an instrument are essential to its being perceived as an instrument at all.'

Physical and practical limitations are inherent in traditional instruments. Audiences recognize these limitations and use them to measure performer skill. The laptop has no such constraints. The laptop performer often operates in a club with limited lighting, their actions obscured by the computer. A further crucial issue regarding the 'instrument' in digital contexts is the multiplicity of possibilities it offers—particularly with a laptop. A traditional instrument has one set of behavioural characteristics, whether timbral, gestural, monophonic or polyphonic. The laptop, however, can be many instruments simultaneously, making its conceptual understanding as an instrument complex.

In a traditional sense, instrumentality implies human agency and virtuosity. Twentieth-century electronic music, particularly acousmatic music—arguably the most confusing music from a performance perspective—subverted hundreds of years of convention regarding playing techniques and how these physical actions relate to music. In acousmatic music, the speaker becomes the primary means of sound production. The traditional limits of instrumentality are stripped away, with virtually any sound now possible. With the computer as an infinitely customisable interface, 'instrument' becomes much more difficult to define.

The piano's limitations are visible to anyone. Mechanically, its basic elements are fixed taut strings struck by a hammer whose velocity is controlled by key pressure. Before Henry Cowell and John Cage, piano strings were not typically touched directly. Therefore, a piano's most limiting factor is its sound design, and a piano is designed to sound aesthetically pleasing.

Many people have experience playing an instrument and understand its basic mechanics. For such audiences, the effort required to perform is physically linked to the resulting musical sound. There is a clear dichotomy between current reception of instrumental performance and modern laptop performance, because the latter generally lacks spectacle or visual cues. 'Spectacle is the guarantor of presence and authenticity, whereas laptop performance represents artifice and absence, the alienation and deferment of presence.'

Glitch music is more mystery than spectacle. It can be performed with little noticeable intervention from the performer. Consequently, audiences may find it confusing why a performer is needed at all. With the performance's inner workings hidden on a laptop screen and parameter control often crammed onto a portable controller, it becomes difficult for audiences to gauge whether the performer is doing much.

This dichotomy is amplified by contemporary audiences being in a state of distracted reception due to overwhelming influence from popular culture. Popular music is often accompanied by music videos with edit cuts seconds apart, bright visual cues, and overly literal metaphors designed to hold fleeting attention. This draws attention away from sonic, structural, and performative aspects of music. Sometimes the lack of 'performance' is replaced by a dancer who provides visual and gestural cues typically offered by an instrumentalist.

A common spectacle in glitch performance is projected video behind the artist, typically abstract animation synchronised to the music. This can mitigate the feeling of lost spectacle and maintain visual attention, but cannot replace gesture intrinsic to a musical instrument.

Whether gesture adds much to electronic music performance is debatable. Current laptop performance techniques resemble the European classical tradition of the eighteenth century, where performances were restrained, focusing on creating a perfect rendition of the score rather than attracting acclaim as a performer. Musically meaningful gestures are communicated by physical means both in early European classical music and laptop music. However, it was not until the nineteenth-century rise of virtuosos like Paganini or Liszt that physical gesture was amplified to focus attention on the performer as celebrity rather than merely as a function of playing. If the preferred mode of performance is generational, it is possible that current audiences can be educated to accept different performance techniques in the future.

With laptops and faster computing in the late 1990s, the divide between studio-based work and live performance became increasingly blurred. The case study focusing on Alva Noto exemplifies this shift. Alva Noto clearly operates differently from spectacle-heavy performers; his deliberately restrained approach is part of a carefully constructed performance aesthetic. His collaborations with instrumentalists, such as the Ensemble Modern on UTP, are extensions of his studio work.

Another artist who has successfully bridged this divide in a contrasting way is Björk. She frequently reappropriates her songs for live settings, even creating different renditions for different tours, removing audience anxiety about merely hearing a backing track and providing surprise and spectacle. At Björk's Volta concerts, the performer's actions on the tenori-on were broadcast live to a panel for the entire audience, partially relieving concerns that the performer was not directing sound generation.

The music industry has moved from focusing on selling physical CDs or virtual downloads to live performance, making it crucial to understand how contemporary electronic music engages with traditional notions of performance. Does the laptop inevitably create a new performance practice? Can traditional virtuosity be communicated without one-to-one mapping of physical gesture to sonic result? The compositions included in this commentary explore both aspects, focusing either on live electronic performance using Ableton Live or on traditional instruments to communicate human presence and gesture.

Alva Noto: Solo and Collaborative Work Compared

Music, like instrumentality, is defined by its limits. How far the composer strays from these limits blurs the line between sonic experimentation and music. When sound creation is in the hands of a non-musician, established musical conventions likely play a lesser role during the compositional process.

Alva Noto is a leading figure in the relatively recent scene of laptop performance. He describes himself as a non-musician and began his professional career as a landscape architect. Alva Noto has mentioned in interviews his preference for avoiding sequencers and working with sound visually. Consequently, his earlier work suits an installation environment—sound to be contemplated and studied. He aims to 'overcome the separation of the sensual perceptions of man' by presenting his works in nontraditional ways. Musically, this takes a strongly cymatic, visually led approach to composition, using frequencies beyond human hearing that can be analysed visually, or applying mathematical patterns to generate compositions.

This approach is evident on the album Prototypes (2000), where Alva Noto consistently challenges the listener with ultra-high frequencies at uncomfortable levels and seemingly endless repetition with little musical variation. The cymatic approach is particularly visible on the track 'm10' from the album Transform (2001), a piece that appears devoid of musical information aside from a repeating rhythmic sine wave rhythm barely perceptible beneath a more dominant lower frequency sine wave gradually increasing in volume.

Sine Scales

I composed this piece at the beginning of the project, using only one sound source. The limiting factor was that the composition had to be entirely humanly conceived, avoiding unnecessary sound design or performance. Frank Bretschneider’s work was the predominant influence here. The sine wave — the simplest sound source — appears with no processes or effects aside from reverb and EQ to imply space. The delay effects near the end were manually programmed. Speed changes reveal imperfect notes in the scales that only become audible at certain tempos, demonstrating that one key process in microsound is repeating notes or millisecond-long samples at high speed to build timbre through composition. I used repeated imperfect scales to highlight that performing an instrument requires years of repetition to approach perfection, whereas a computer can make this repetition compositionally interesting in far less time.

Harmonic Guitar

This piece was conceived as an imitation of a live guitar performance, reminiscent of Christian Fennesz or Christopher Willets, where a part would be recorded, looped, and built upon over time. Such an approach could have used Max/MSP to record a mix of the original performance in the background and overlay it with added notes. The opening phrase begins with a single note, added to on subsequent repetitions. A significant challenge was the amount of background noise from the samples, likely because many individual quietly recorded samples were sequenced together — each capture contributes its own noise floor, whereas a single continuous performance includes that noise only once and is simpler to manage. I initially planned a live companion piece but abandoned the guitar in favor of piano. At first I wanted to avoid the crackle and noise, thinking it too typical of my usual style. I later included a Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) version of the entire composition as a single track, reducing it to a simple sine-wave resonance of the original; this emerges alone toward the end as the guitar fades. Repetition was another conceptual driver — Tibetan Buddhist monks use repetitive chanting for meditation, and I was inspired that music could produce such effects. A binaural sine wave, mixed very low, pulses between the ears in headphones, creating a binaural beat whose frequency difference can generate alpha waves in the brain, potentially influencing mental state.

Piano

This composition blends sampled performance with sequenced material. Most of the melodic content comes from individual sampled piano keys. The repeated rhythmic melodic line is rigidly sequenced, accompanied by a high-pitched melody made from a small three-note performance processed through Soundhack’s phase vocoder. In the middle, the piano melody takes the foreground for the first time, while the glitch elements shift from percussive to accompanimental, providing a contrast that highlights a traditional performative aspect. The kick rhythm layers several short clicks; their timbre changes depending on quantization accuracy, a property I exploited to create timbral variation from bar to bar — mimicking how acoustic notes never sound exactly the same. At the end, the piano swells and distorts over the glitch sounds, asserting its importance. Composing piano parts reinforced for me the inescapable link between tonality and the refrain in creating memorable melodies.

Ominousness

This piece was performed by plugging a bass guitar directly into a soundcard, then recording and cutting the result into samples. An instrument’s ability to modify timbre intuitively proved valuable; I aimed to communicate this by using extended techniques on the bass guitar alone. The melody is a simple bass pluck sampled and sequenced four octaves higher. I created a bowed timbre by bowing the bass with a cello bow. At the end, the track sounds as if gated, but this effect is manual — I automated the master volume. Just as a skilled performer controls their instrument, subverting the sequencer through unconventional techniques like this demonstrates analogous personal control over the computer.

Pepe512

Around this composition and the one that followed, I had started investigating less traditional performance methods and began exploring Ableton Live’s performance potential. This piece explored the glitch offshoot “clicks and cuts” from the Mille Plateaux label, but with a more popular-music slant.

I composed a number of scenes within Ableton Live that served as the structural backbone of the piece, although I overused separate scenes when simply deactivating or modifying clips would have been sufficient. This underscores for me the inherent instrumentality of Ableton Live—it demands a degree of learning and practice comparable to a traditional instrument—and shows that external MIDI controllers like the Korg NanoKontrol (see Figure 1) supply the well-considered limitations on which instrumentality depends.

Sinebass

This piece further investigates the Clicks and Cuts aesthetic, but in a more sparse vein. The idea was to craft something reflecting a currently viable mode of performance. More than the other compositions, this one would feel at home in a club, employing numerous dance-music conventions such as heavily compressed percussion and musical shifts occurring every eight bars. At 3'07'', a clear crossfade occurs as one part closes and a new one begins, referencing DJing as the prevailing performance practice within electronic music today.

Figure 1: Korg NanoKontrol

The Korg NanoKontrol is an affordable, portable controller built for laptop performance. It offers nine fully customisable faders and rotary controls, plus two assignable buttons per channel.

NanoClicks

This was my first attempt at performing with MIDI controllers. Unlike the two preceding pieces, which were left structurally incomplete before performance, this one concentrates on modifying sampler parameters in real time. Drawing on John Croft's “Theses on Liveness”—that the simplest route to an identifiable performance is to limit processes to fairly transparent ones such as filtration, reverb, and transposition—I assigned the Korg Nano's faders to the volume of the glitch and sine tracks, and the rotary controls to both reverb output and reverb decay for the sine track. Since the structure was completed beforehand, the length is fixed. Logic's controller mapping is less adaptable than Ableton's, and the rigid duration does not easily accommodate mistakes. I hesitate to claim that grafting traditional concepts of instrumentality onto a computer-based piece yields the most compelling performances; I suspect computers will eventually forge their own standard performance techniques.

Sjasja

Unlike the other Ableton Live pieces, this one avoids a standard dance beat. I envisioned it as the culmination of my Ableton work to date, prioritising both structural and timbral detail using the Korg NanoKontrol instead of the mouse and keyboard. The sound design is entirely free of instrumentation, focusing on sounds achievable only through digital means, though layering multiple similar clicks—reminiscent of Pole’s album 123 (2008)—and using simple dry delays allowed me to generate subtle textural variations. In this piece the Korg NanoKontrol functions as an instrument, triggering multiple clips with a single button press; using a mouse would require three or four separate clicks.

Rackudesu

While previous tracks depended on creating separate scenes for variation, here I restricted myself to only two scenes, pushing myself to rely on the Korg NanoKontrol for parameter automation and clip changes. I had to use Ableton's mapping capabilities inventively to build structure—for instance, binding multiple channel play buttons to a single Nano button. The degree of transformation and automated process available with one button press elevates the notion of an instrument's easily changeable timbre to an entirely new level, though I remain uncertain whether this can yield genuinely interesting performances, because it limits the audience's ability to perceive the extent of human involvement.

Pianwanwan

I created this largely from a sampled A4 piano note, constraining the sound design in a manner similar to Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s collaboration on Insen. I mapped several transformative parameters to a single rotary fader, aiming for interesting timbral effects with minimal physical movement—paralleling Julio D’Escriván’s description of sentic gestures in music. An EQ on the master channel had its high-pass filter assigned to a rotary fader, alongside the frequency of an auto filter, while the strip fader beneath controlled both the wet/dry mix of a filter delay and the resonance of an auto filter. This produced a powerful result at 2'10'', which I believe conveys a strong implied audible human interaction through the non‑linear movement of filter parameters. As with a traditional instrument, when an audience can easily gauge the performer’s efforts, it can foster trust and generate a more exciting performance.

4. Conclusion

What this project and its accompanying research have shown me as a composer is that people without formal music training develop their own idiosyncratic practices based on their needs and the technology they use. Over time, such techniques will become the accepted norms for contemporary electronic music performance.

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Discography

Alva Noto. (2002) Mimikry, Raster Noton.

Alva Noto. (2001) Transform, Mille Plateaux.

Alva Noto. (2000) Prototypes, Mille Plateaux.

Betke, S. (2008) 123, Scape.

Björk. (2009) Voltaic, One Little Indian.

Fennesz, C. (2002) Field Recordings 1995 – 2002, Touch.

Fennesz, C. (2007) Cendre, Touch.

Sakamoto, R. & Alva Noto. (2005) Insen, Raster‑Noton.