"Grain, Sequence, System": Three Levels of Reception in the Performance of Laptop Music

Intro The increasing use of laptop computers in the performance of electronic music has resurrected timeworn issues for both musicians and audiences. Liberated by the use of the laptop as a musical instrument, musicians have blurred the boundaries separating studio and stage, as well as the corresponding authorial and performance modes of work. On the other hand, audiences experience the laptop's use as a musical instrument as a violation of the codes of musical performance. This is not a new issue for electronic music: the lack of visual stimuli while performing on technological "instruments" has plagued electronic music for over 40 years with little progress in providing solutions. This essay discusses issues of performance from the point of view of how electronic music is received rather than how it is presented. Drawing on concepts found in "reception theory," I will examine three levels of reception inherent in the performance of laptop music as used in the performance of contemporary electronic music. These three levels are: the grain of laptop performance, the sequence of historical linkages, and the system of super-culture and its effect of the reception apparatus of the public. Grain: Laptop Performance Spectacle is the guarantor of presence and authenticity, whereas laptop performance represents artifice and absence, the alienation and deferment of presence. After approximately forty years of electronic music, the issues surrounding how audiences receive the performance of electronic music have yet to be resolved. Electronic music is best appreciated when an audience is engaged in a contemplative mode of "active reception." The problem arises when an audience receives music in a mode of "distracted reception." "Distracted reception" mode is created by constant immersion in pop media, and sets expectations that the musician will produce meaning through spectacle—and this atrophies the audience's ability to produce meaning for him or herself. Historically, the unfamiliar codes used in electronic music performance have prevented audiences from attributing "presence" and "authenticity" to the performer. Seen more as a technician than a musician, the performer of electronic music hovers over a nest of cables, knobs and blinking lights; electronic circuits filling the space with sound via an "artificial" process. Today, most live electronic music is performed on laptop computers in the traditional proscenium setting of concert halls, theaters, and galleries. This context invokes the standard performer-audience polarity, which places the performer in the role of a cultural authority. During laptop performances, the standard visual codes disappear into the micro-movements of the performer's hand and wrist motions, leaving the mainstream audience's expectations unfulfilled. In traditional musical performances, the score has an obvious origin that is revealed to an audience by the act of a musician interpreting it. The musician recalls the score from his or her memory and performs the piece with emotional expression, giving the illusion of spontaneous composition. In laptop performance, the origin of the score is never revealed; the performer does not serve as a conduit for it, and does nothing to convince the audience that a score exists. Music performed on a laptop is lacking in one element: its unique existence at the place where it happened to be created. Laptop music adopts the quality of having been broadcast from an absent space-time rather than a displaced one. In other words, a score most likely does not exist and the sounds themselves are unable to reveal a recognizable source. The laptop musician broadcasts sounds from a virtual non-place; the performance feigns the effect of presence and authenticity where none really exists. The cultural artifact produced by the laptop musician is then misread as "counterfeit," leaving the audience unable to attach value to the experience. The laptop performer, perhaps unknowingly, has appropriated the practice of acousmatic music and transplanted its issues. Sequence: Genre Interrupted Laptop music has a historical precursor to its presentation format: "acousmatic music." In the practice of acousmatic music, there are specific codes used to organize its presentation with which the audience produces meaning. In this style of presentation, the composer usually sits in the audience, operates a mixing board, tape player and/or laptop computer and "performs" the composition by playing back his or her recorded composition. The audience typically sits facing the loudspeakers on stage and receives the work as a sonic narrative that is piloted by the composer. The academic music community has engaged in this presentation of music without a need for "the social rituals prompted by the interaction of stage performer(s) and audience."i) Over the past forty years, little has changed with regard to the public's reception of electronic music. As audiences become increasingly enculturated by pop media, the media's "network of aura" (i.e., the combined effect of music video, film, TV, radio, Internet, magazines, etc.) consistently fulfills the public's expectations, thereby conventionalizing the codes of cultural consumption. The process of enculturation, the purpose of which is to maximize profits by creating brand-loyal customers, gradually erodes the ability to construct meaning in art. By privileging certain codes of musical performance and fulfilling a conventionalized set of expectations, audiences consume music as a commodity and less as an artform. The appropriation of electronic music by dance music culture has reduced the signifiers its borrowed from 20th century music to self-referential icons. Without bringing forward their original contexts, the transformed signifiers have difficulty yielding new significance. Additionally, the iconic nature of these signifiers and their newly attached meanings erodes the need to bring the original contexts forward. The result is that electronic music (i.e., Electronica) remains bracketed, leaving the receiver adrift in arbitrary meanings and multiple layers of misreadings. While Electronica uses many of the spectacularized presentation codes of rock music, their use has accelerated a conventionalized set of codes used to fulfill audience expectations and sustain demand for it products. Consequently, these audiences misread laptop-oriented sub-cultures such as "microsound" and "glitch" because they are unable to work through oppositions to their expectations. In order for electronic music to return to artistic growth, there needs to be a shift towards recuperating historical contexts, building awareness of audience expectations and developing non-distracted modes of reception. System: Satellites of Super-Culture Upon examining how cultural codes and mechanisms operate in the system of consumer capitalism, it is clear that sub-cultures orbit parasitically around pop media or super-culture in order to exist. Super-culture supplies all the necessary systems of economics, advertising, presentation, etc. that allow a sub-culture to produce demand for its products in a competitive market. Once a sub-culture feeds off the systems of super-culture, they encounter similar political-economic problems. As an example: when money is exchanged for electronic music performed on a laptop, the audience has the expectation that they will receive a demonstration of musical skills they do not own. The more skill (hence authority) the performer can demonstrate, the more value is received by the audience. However, it is difficult for an audience to perceive the value of a performance where the artist could simply be playing back soundfiles on a device more suited to an office cubicle than a stage. Consequently, the standard codes of musical performance are violated: the laptop is doing the work, no skill is required or demonstrated, and the artist could just as easily be any one of the audience faking a performance. This violation is fatal to the audience attempting to overcome opposition to their expectations and reduces the value of the exchange. The interruption of electronic music from its historical lineage has displaced the precursors to laptop music performance. As a result, electronic music culture has become bracketed, synchronic; its signifiers set adrift and assigned meaning on an arbitrary basis. The system of super-culture has severed, assimilated and recast electronica's artifacts; providing ease of consumption and easily fills expectations, thereby driving a demand for its product. Its use-value remains primarily social, desire-based, and orbits super-culture/pop-media in parasitic orbit. Conclusion "What the absence of visual identification makes anonymous, unifies and prompts a more attentive listening." ii) With the vast network of control that super-culture exerts over the various culture industries, it is no fault of the audience that it is unable to recuperate the lost modes of active reception. While the rotational beacon of pop media transmits its message of disposable consumption, other forces are required to recuperate lost modes of reception. When the default mode becomes one of attention deficit, it becomes too much to work past the obstacles to aesthetic appreciation. Laptop music is a result of rhizomatic growth, the advance of technology that liberates the user and changes the way they organize their work. This change has caused audiences to become confused as to what they are consuming; authorial identity is displaced, and the process by which music is performed remains mystified. If computers are simply the repositories of intellectual property, then musical composition and its performance are now also located in this virtual space. The composer transfers his or her mental work into the computer, and it is brought to life by interacting with it through the interface of a software application. The paradigm may have changed slightly for the transmission of electronic music, but audiences need to reprogram their cultural apparatus for active reception in order to recuperate their ability to participate in the production of meaning. It is in this way that audiences can better appreciate the masterful works that will form diachronic linkages for future musicians and audiences. Electronic music can then resume its growth as an artform instead of being relegated to the dustbins of pop media history.

'Post-Digital' Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music Kim Cascone

"The digital revolution is over." Nicholas Negroponte (1998) 

Over the past decade, the Internet has helped spawn a new movement in digital music. It is not academically based, and for the most part the composers involved are self-taught. Music journalists occupy themselves inventing names for it, and some have already taken root: glitch, microwave, DSP, sinecore, and microscopic music. These names evolved through a collection of decon-structive audio and visual techniques that allow artists to work beneath the previously impen-etrable veil of digital media. The Negroponte epi-graph above inspired me to refer to this emergent genre as ‘post-digital' because the revolutionary period of the digital information age has surely passed. The tendrils of digital technology have in some way touched everyone. With electronic com-merce now a natural part of the business fabric of the Western world and Hollywood cranking out digital fluff by the gigabyte, the medium of digital technology holds less fascination for composers in and of itself. In this article, I will emphasize that the medium is no longer the message; rather, specific tools themselves have become the message.

The Internet was originally created to accelerate the exchange of ideas and development of research between academic centers, so it is perhaps no sur-prise that it is responsible for helping give birth to new trends in computer music outside the con-fines of academic think tanks. A non-academic composer can search the Internet for tutorials and papers on any given aspect of computer music to obtain a good, basic understanding of it. University computer music centers breed developers whose tools are shuttled around the Internet and used to develop new music outside the university.

Unfortunately, cultural exchange between non-academic artists and research centers has been lacking. The post-digital music that Max, SMS, AudioSculpt, PD, and other such tools make pos-sible rarely makes it back to the ivory towers, yet these non-academic composers anxiously await new tools to make their way onto a multitude of Web sites. Even in the commercial software industry, the marketing departments of most audio software companies have not yet fully grasped the post-digi-tal aesthetic; as a result, the more unusual tools emanate from developers who use their academic training to respond to personal creative needs.

This article is an attempt to provide feedback to both academic and commercial music software de-velopers by showing how current DSP tools are be-ing used by post-digital composers, affecting both the form and content of contemporary ‘non-academic' electronic music.

"It is failure that guides evolution; perfection offers no incentive for improvement." Colson Whitehead (1999)

The ‘post-digital' aesthetic was developed in part as a result of the immersive experience of working in environments suffused with digital technology: computer fans whirring, laser printers churning out documents, the sonification of user-interfaces, and the muffled noise of hard drives. But more spe-cifically, it is from the ‘failure' of digital technol-ogy that this new work has emerged: glitches, bugs, application errors, system crashes, clipping, aliasing, distortion, quantization noise, and even the noise floor of computer sound cards are the raw materials composers seek to incorporate into their music.

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 effi-cient as the humans who build them. New techniques are often discovered by accident or by the failure of an intended technique or experiment.

"I would only observe that in most high-profile gigs, failure tends to be far more interesting to the audience than success." - David Zicarelli (1999)

There are many types of digital audio ‘failure.' Sometimes, it results in horrible noise, while other times it can produce wondrous tapestries of sound. (To more adventurous ears, these are quite often the same.) When the German sound experimenters known as Oval started creating music in the early 1990s by painting small images on the underside of CDs to make them skip, they were using an aspect of ‘failure' in their work that revealed a subtextual layer embedded in the compact disc.

Oval's investigation of ‘failure' is not new. Much work had previously been done in this area such as the optical soundtrack work of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Oskar Fischinger, as well as the vinyl record manipulations of John Cage and Christian Marclay, to name a few. What is new is that ideas now travel at the speed of light and can spawn entire musical genres in a relatively short period of time.

> Back to the Future

Poets, painters, and composers sometimes walk a fine line between madness and genius, and throughout the ages they have used ‘devices' such as absinthe, narcotics, or mystical states to help make the jump from merely expanding their perceptual boundaries to hoisting themselves into territories beyond these boundaries. This trend to seek out and explore new territories led to much experimentation in the arts in the early part of the 20th century.

When artists of the early 20th century turned their senses to the world created by industrial progress, they were forced to focus on the new and changing landscape of what was considered ‘background.'

"I now note that ordinarily I am concerned with, focus my attention upon, things or ‘objects,' the words on the page. But I now note that these are always situated within what begins to appear to me as a widening field which ordinarily is a background from which the ‘object' or thing stands out. I now find by a purposeful act of attention that I may turn to the field as field, and in the case of vision I soon also discern that the field has a kind of boundary or limit, a horizon. This horizon always tends to ‘escape' me when I try to get at it; it ‘withdraws' always on the extreme fringe of the visual field. It retains a certain essentially enigmatic character." - Don Idhe (1976)

Concepts such as ‘detritus,' ‘by-product,' and ‘background' (or ‘horizon') are important to con-sider when examining how the current post-digi-tal movement started. When visual artists first shifted their focus from foreground to background (for instance, from portraiture to landscape paint-ing), it helped to expand their perceptual bound-aries, enabling them to capture the background's enigmatic character.

The basic composition of ‘background' is com-prised of data we filter out to focus on our imme-diate surroundings. The data hidden in our perceptual ‘blind spot' contains worlds waiting to be explored, if we choose to shift our focus there. Today's digital technology enables artists to explore new territories for content by capturing and examining the area beyond the boundary of ‘normal' functions and uses of software.

Although the lineage of post-digital music is com-plex, there are two important and well-known pre-cursors that helped frame its emergence: the Italian Futurist movement at the beginning of the 20th century, and John Cage's composition 4'33' (1952).

Futurism was an attempt to reinvent life as it was being reshaped by new technologies. The Italian Futurist painter Luigi Russolo was so inspired by a 1913 orchestral performance of a composition by Balilla Pratella that he wrote a manifesto, The Art of Noises, in the form of a letter to Pratella. His manifesto and subsequent experiments with intonarumori (noise intoners), which imitated urban industrial sounds, transmitted a viral message to future generations, resulting in Russolo's current status as the ‘grandfather' of contemporary ‘post-digital' music. The Futurists considered in-dustrial life a source of beauty, and for them it provided an ongoing symphony. Car engines, ma-chines, factories, telephones, and electricity had been in existence for only a short time, and the resulting din was a rich palette for the Futurists to use in their sound experiments.

"The variety of noises is infinite. If today, when we have perhaps a thousand different machines, we can distinguish a thousand different noises, tomorrow, as new machines multiply, we will be able to distinguish ten, twenty, or thirty thousand different noises, not merely in a simply imitative way, but to combine them according to our imagination." - Luigi Russolo (1913)

This was probably the first time in history that sound artists shifted their focus from the foreground of musical notes to the background of incidental sound. Russolo and Ugo Piatti - who together constructed the noise intoners - gave them descriptive names such as ‘exploders,' ‘roarers,' ‘croakers,' ‘thunderers,' ‘bursters,' ‘cracklers,' ‘buzzers,' and ‘scrapers.' Although the intonarumori themselves never found their way into much of the music in the Futurists' time, they did manage to inspire composers like Stravinsky and Ravel to incorporate some of these types of sounds into their work.

A few decades after the Futurists brought incidental noise to the foreground, John Cage would give permission to all composers to use any sound in composing music. At the 1952 debut of Cage's 4'33', David Tudor opened the piano keyboard lid and sat for the duration indicated in the title, implicitly inviting the audience to listen to back-ground sounds, only closing and reopening the lid to demarcate three movements. The idea for 4'33' was outlined in a lecture given by Cage at Vassar College in 1948, entitled ‘A Composer's Confessions.' The following year, Cage saw the white paintings of Robert Rauschenberg, and he saw in this an oppor-tunity to keep pace with painting and push the stifled boundaries of modern music. Rauschenberg's white paintings combined chance, non-intention, and ‘minimalism' in one broad stroke, where the paintings revealed the ‘changing play of light and shadow and the presence of dust' (Kahn 1999).

Rauschenberg's white paintings were a powerful catalyst that helped inspire Cage to remove all con-straints on what was considered music. Every environment could be experienced in a completely new way - as music.

Of equal importance to Cage's ‘silent piece' was his realization that there is, in fact, no such thing as ‘silence' - that, as human beings, our sensory per-ceptions occur against the background noise of our biological systems. His experience in an anechoic chamber at Harvard University prior to composing 4'33' shattered the belief that silence was obtainable and revealed that the state of ‘nothing' was a condition filled with everything we filtered out. From then on, Cage strove to incorporate this revelation into subsequent works by paying attention not only to sound objects, but also to their background.

> Snap, Crackle, Glitch

Fast-forwarding from the 1950s to the present, we skip over most of the electronic music of the 20th century, much of which has not, in my opinion, focused on expanding the ideas first explored by the Futurists and Cage. An emergent genre that consciously builds on these ideas is that which I have termed ‘post-digital,' but it shares many names, as noted in the introduction, and I will refer to it from here on out as glitch. The glitch genre arrived on the back of the electronica movement, an umbrella term for alternative, largely dance-based electronic music (including house, techno, electro, drum'n'bass, ambient) that has come into vogue in the past five years. Most of the work in this area is released on labels peripherally associated with the dance music market, and is therefore removed from the contexts of academic consideration and acceptability that it might otherwise earn. Still, in spite of this odd pairing of fashion and art music, the composers of glitch often draw their inspiration from the masters of 20th century music who they feel best describe its lineage.

> A Brief History of Glitch

At some point in the early 1990s, techno music settled into a predictable, formulaic genre serving a more or less aesthetically homogeneous market of DJs and dance music aficionados. Concomitant with this development was the rise of a periphery of DJs and producers eager to expand the music's tendrils into new areas. One can visualize techno as a large postmodern appropriation machine, as-similating cultural references, tweaking them, and then re-presenting them as tongue-in-cheek jokes. DJs, fueled with samples from thrift store pur-chases of obscure vinyl, managed to mix any source imaginable into sets played for more adventurous dance floors. Always trying to outdo one another, it was only a matter of time until DJs unearthed the history of electronic music in their archeological thrift store digs. Once the door was opened to exploring the history of electronic mu-sic, invoking its more notable composers came into vogue. A handful of DJs and composers of electronica were suddenly familiar with the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Morton Subotnick, and John Cage, and their influence helped spawn the glitch movement.

A pair of Finnish producers called Pan Sonic - then known as Panasonic, before a team of corpo-rate lawyers encouraged them to change their name - led one of the first forays into experimentation in electronica. Mika Vainio, head architect of the Pan Sonic sound, used handmade sine wave oscillators and a collection of inexpensive effect pedals and synthesizers to create a highly synthetic, minimal, ‘hard-edged' sound. Their first CD, titled Vakio, was released in the summer of 1993, and was a sonic shockwave compared to the more blissful strains of ambient-techno becoming popular at that time. The Pan Sonic sound con-jured stark, florescent, industrial landscapes; test-tones were pounded into submission until they squirted out low, throbbing drones and high-pitched stabs of sine waves. The record label Vainio founded, Sähkö Records, released material 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 experimenting with CD-skipping techniques and helped to create a new tendril of glitch - one of slow-moving slabs of dense, flitting textures. Another German group, which called itself Mouse on Mars, injected this glitch aesthetic into a more danceable framework, resulting in gritty low-fidelity rhythmic layers warping in and out of one another.

From the mid-1990s forward, the glitch aesthetic appeared in various sub-genres, including drum‘n'bass, drill'n'bass, and trip-hop. Artists such as Aphex Twin, LTJ Bukem, Omni Trio, Wagon Christ, and Goldie were experimenting with all sorts of manipulation in the digital domain. Time-stretching vocals and reducing drum loops to eight bits or less were some of the first techniques used in creating artifacts and exposing them as timbral content. The more experimental side of electronica was still growing and slowly es-tablishing a vocabulary.

By the late 1990s, the glitch movement was keeping pace with the release of new features in music software, and the movement began congealing into a rudimentary form. A roster of artists was developing. Japanese producer Ryoji Ikeda was one of the first artists other than Mika Vainio to gain expo-sure for his stark, ‘bleepy' soundscapes. In contrast to Vainio, Ikeda brought a serene quality of spirituality to glitch music. His first CD, entitled +/-, was one of the first glitch releases to break new ground in the delicate use of high frequencies and short sounds that stab at listeners' ears, often leav-ing the audience with a feeling of tinnitus.

Another artist who helped bridge the gap be-tween delicate and damaging was Carsten Nicolai (who records and performs under the name Noto). Nicolai is also a co-founder of Noton/Rastermusic, a German label group that specializes in innovative digital music. In a similar fashion, Peter Rehberg, Christian Fennesz, and the sound/Net art project Farmers Manual are tightly associated with the Mego label located in Vienna. Rehberg has the distinction of having received one of only two honorary Ars Electronica awards in Digital Music for his contribution to electronic music. Over the past few years, the glitch movement has grown to encompass dozens of artists who are defining new vocabularies in digital media. Artists such as immedia, Taylor Deupree, Nobukazu Takemura, Neina, Richard Chartier, Pimmon, *0, Autopoieses, and T:un[k], to name just a few, constitute the second wave of sound hackers exploring the glitch aesthetic.

There are many artists who have not been mentioned here who contribute to pushing the boundaries of this movement. It is beyond the scope of this article to go deeply into the evolution of glitch music, but I have included a discography at the end of this article that will offer good starting points for the casual listener.

> Power Tools

Computers have become the primary tools for creating and performing electronic music, while the Internet has become a logical new distribution medium. For the first time in history, creative output and the means of its distribution have been inextricably linked. Our current sonic backgrounds have dramatically changed since 4'33' was first performed - and thus the means for navigating our sur-roundings as well. In response to the radical alteration of our hearing by the tools and technologies developed in academic computer music centers - and a distribution medium capable of shuttling tools, ideas, and music between like-minded composers and engineers - the resultant glitch movement can be seen as a natural progression in electronic music. In this new music, the tools themselves have become the instruments, and the resulting sound is born of their use in ways unintended by their designers. Commonly referred to as sound ‘mangling' or ‘crunching,' composers are now able to view music on a microscopic level. Curtis Roads coined the term microsound for all variants of granular and atomic methods of sound synthesis, and tools capable of operating at this microscopic level are able to achieve these effects. Because the tools used in this style of music embody advanced concepts of digital signal processing, their usage by glitch artists tends to be based on experimentation rather than empirical investigation. In this fashion, unintended usage has become the second permission granted. It has been said that one does not need advanced training to use digital signal processing programs - just ‘mess around' until you obtain the desired result. Sometimes, not knowing the theoretical operation of a tool can result in more interesting results by ‘thinking outside of the box.' As Bob Ostertag notes, ‘It appears that the more technology is thrown at the problem, the more boring the results' (1998).

"I looked at my paper, said Cage. Suddenly I saw that the music, all the music, was already there.' He conceived of a procedure which would enable him to derive the details of his music from the little glitches and imperfections which can be seen on sheets of paper. It had symbolic as well as practical value; it made the unwanted features of the paper its most significant ones—there is not even a visual silence." - David Revill (1999)

> New Music From New Tools

Tools now aid composers in the deconstruction of digital files: exploring the sonic possibilities of a Photoshop file that displays an image of a flower, trawling word processing documents in search of coherent bytes of sound, using noise-reduction software to analyze and process audio in ways that the software designer never intended. Any selection of algorithms can be interfaced to pass data back and forth, mapping effortlessly from one dimension into another. In this way, all data can become fodder for sonic experimentation.

Composers of glitch music have gained their technical knowledge through self-study, countless hours deciphering software manuals, and probing Internet newsgroups for needed information. They have used the Internet both as a tool for learning and as a method of distributing their work. Com-posers now need to know about file types, sample rates, and bit resolution to optimize their work for the Internet. The artist completes a cultural feedback loop in the circuit of the Internet: artists download tools and information, develop ideas based on that information, create work reflecting those ideas with the appropriate tools, and then upload that work to a World Wide Web site where other artists can explore the ideas embedded in the work.

The technical requirements for being a musician in the information age may be more rigorous than ever before, but - compared to the depth of university computer music studies - it is still rather light. Most of the tools being used today have a layer of abstraction that enables artists to explore without demanding excessive technical knowledge. Tools like Reaktor, Max/MSP, MetaSynth, Audiomulch, Crusher-X, and Soundhack are pressed into action, more often than not with little care or regard for the technical details of DSP theory, and more as an aesthetic wandering through the sounds that these modern tools can create.

The medium is no longer the message in glitch music: the tool has become the message. The technique of exposing the minutiae of DSP errors and artifacts for their own sonic value has helped further blur the boundaries of what is to be considered music, but it has also forced us to also to examine our preconceptions of failure and detritus more carefully.

> Discussion

Electronica DJs typically view individual tracks as pieces that can be layered and mixed freely. This modular approach to creating new work from pre-existing materials forms the basis of electronic music composers' use of samples. Glitch, however, takes a more deconstructionist approach in that the tendency is to reduce work to a minimum amount of information. Many glitch pieces reflect a stripped-down, anechoic, atomic use of sound, and they typically last from one to three minutes.

But it seems this approach affects the listening habits of electronica aficionados. I had the experi-ence of hearing a popular sample CD playing in a clothing boutique. The ‘atomic' parts, or samples, used in composing electronica from small modular pieces had become the whole. This is a clear indication that contemporary computer music has become fragmented, it is composed of stratified layers that intermingle and defer meaning until the listener takes an active role in the production of meaning.

If glitch music is to advance past its initial stage of blind experimentation, new tools must be built with an educational bent in mind. That is, a tool should possess multiple layers of abstraction that allow novices to work at a simple level, stripping away those layers as they gain mastery. In order to help better understand current trends in electronic music, the researchers in academic centers must keep abreast of these trends. Certainly, many of their college students are familiar with the music and can suggest pieces for listening. The compact discs given in this article's reference list form a good starting point. More information can be obtained by reading some of the many electronic mailing lists dedicated to electronica, such as the microsound, idm, and wire lists. In this way, the gap can be bridged, and new ideas can flow more openly between commercial and academic sectors.

"We therefore invite young musicians of talent to conduct a sustained observation of all noises, in order to understand the various rhythms of which they are composed, their principal and secondary tones. By comparing the various tones of noises with those of sounds, they will be convinced of the extent to which the former exceeds the latter. This will afford not only an understanding, but also a taste and passion for noises." - Luigi Russolo (1913)

Reinterpretation, Metrical Dissonance, and Asymmetry in Electronic Dance Music 4

[32] A quite different, though not unrelated, approach to the "presence" of asymmetrical patterns is suggested by some of Stephen Handel's recent work. In a 1998 article, Handel considers how metrical structure interacts with a special type of grouping known as figural organization. When figural organization is in effect, tones are heard as discrete groups. The listener attends to the number of tones constituting each group, but not to the exact timing between the groups. This means that different rhythms can have the same figural organization. For instance, in a 16-pulse pattern, the rhythms X.X..X....X.X... and X.X....X..X.X... (where Xs stand for attacks, dots stand for unarticulated beats, and tones separated by only one beat are considered part of the same group) have an identical figural organization, which Handel defines as two tones, silence, one tone, silence, two tones, silence (or 2-1-2-). Cognitive psychologists have claimed that meter is necessary to compensate for the imprecision of figural hearing--that listeners use it to measure the differences between otherwise similar rhythms. The three experiments that form the basis of Handel's article suggest, however, that figural organization may be just as important as meter in rhythmic perception. Handel found that listeners tend to have a hard time discriminating between rhythms with the same figural structure; furthermore, the effect of meter (and of various strategies aimed at highlighting metrical organization) is particularly limited in "weakly metric" patterns (those in which the majority of attacks do not coincide with tactus-level beats). Handel's focus on the relationship between meter and "weakly metric" rhythms makes his work promising for scholars of electronic dance music, since asymmetrical patterns frequently intermingle with even rhythms in this repertory. (A classic example is 808 State's track "Cubik," in which a prominent 3+3+3+3+4 synthesizer pattern sounds against even quarter-note drumbeats.) Handel's findings, like those of Rahn, discourage us from viewing asymmetrical rhythms as embellishments of a metrical background and provide another way of accounting for their distinctive perceptual qualities.
[33] All of the grid alternatives discussed thus far emphasize rhythmic organization over metrical structure. Nonetheless, they still preserve some sort of separation between rhythm and meter. Another possibility is to reject this division altogether. This is the approach Christopher Hasty takes in his recent book Meter as Rhythm. Instead of seeing metrical accents as a series of timepoints, Hasty characterizes meter in terms of events. He claims that meter arises when the duration of an event is replicated through a process called projection. See Example 6, a reproduction of his Example 7.2. In this diagram, capital letters A and B represent two events. At first, we do not know how long A will last. When B begins, however, the duration of A becomes definite; it now has the potential to be replicated by B. This projective potential is shown by the solid arrow Q; the dotted line Q' shows the projected duration.
[34] Hasty also classifies events as beginnings, continuations, or anacruses. He then uses these concepts to discuss different types of meter, claiming that certain types involve more complex perceptions than others. Duple, or equal meter, is the simplest type because it involves the perception of a second event as a continuation of an initial event (see Example 7, part a, in which continuation is shown by the arrow Q). Triple meter involves a more prolonged sense of continuation, as shown in Example 7, part b; it is also more complex than duple because it denies a potential two-beat duration, as indicated by the crossed-out arrow Q in Example 8. Hasty describes this special type of denial asdeferral.
[35] In Hasty's system, meters consisting of irregularly spaced beats engender considerably more complicated perceptual processes. In duple and triple, all suggested projections are realized (although in the case of triple, the last projection is deferred); in an asymmetrical meter, however, some projections will never be realized. For example, in 5/4 meter with a 3+2 division, the three-beat projection suggested by the first part of the measure is denied when the second measure begins. See Example 9, in which the potential duration Q', indicated by the dotted line, is denied. A similar denial occurs in the second measure of a 2+3 pattern, as shown in Example 10 by the dotted line R'. Although Hasty claims that our perception of such patterns is complex, he notes that they should not be considered "unnatural or confused." His approach is useful for EDM because it does not simply describe irregular patterns as syncopated, but rather provides a detailed description of the processes engendering their rhythmic complexity. In this way it can provide a convincing account of the richness that one perceives in the rhythmic surface of this music.
[36] As the foregoing discussion has shown, the approaches of Rahn, Handel, and Hasty each provide a distinctive contribution to our understanding of the asymmetrical patterns that occur in electronic dance music. Rahn provides a structural account of the special characteristics of these rhythms, while Handel and Hasty focus more on issues of perception. Handel suggests an alternate mode of hearing that may play a role in the cognition of such patterns; Hasty, on the other hand, applies the same perceptual principle (projection) to all meters, while also showing the unique ways it plays out in irregularly spaced meters. While there are obvious differences between these approaches, they should not be considered mutually exclusive. For instance, although Rahn and Handel, unlike Hasty, preserve a separation between rhythm and meter, their respective emphases (structural properties and figural hearing) could still be situated within Hasty's method. Likewise, Hasty's discussion of projection could be applied to asymmetrical patterns even if those patterns are not considered strictly metrical. In fact, I would ultimately conclude that such patterns are not generally metrical in electronic dance music (given that they usually occur in conjunction with regularly spaced patterns that can be heard as metrical more easily). Nonetheless, I would argue that they should not be treated as transient foreground phenomena superimposed onto an underlying regular structure. Rather, as these three methods show us, these rhythms have a distinctive presence of their own and should be considered structurally significant in their own right.
[37] Our exploration has shown a variety of ways in which rhythm and meter are used to create musical interest in electronic dance music. Displacement dissonances subvert metrical stability; inherently ambiguous patterns encourage multiple interpretations; and asymmetrical patterns counteract the regularity of persistent even rhythms. The common link between all these phenomena is an emphasis on interpretive multiplicity. In other words, electronic dance music encourages us to hear it in a variety of ways. As we have seen, this multiplicity functions on many different levels. Individual patterns are often intrinsically ambiguous. Furthermore, they frequently remain so even when used in combination: when there is no definitive metrical layer, the distinction between metrical and antimetrical layers may not be apparent. Even when all the elements of a meter are in place, reinterpretations can turn the beat around, showing the listener that the metrical structure was not quite what it seemed to be. And finally, the persistent repetition of both asymmetrical and even patterns encourages multiple perspectives on rhythmic and metrical structure, thereby undermining any sense that there is a singularstructure underlying the music.
[38] In spite of these conclusions, a number of questions remain. First, how might the instabilities and ambiguities that I have discussed be played out on a larger scale? In what ways do EDM musicians create subtlety in a work as a whole? What sorts of processes occur during the course of complete tracks, albums, and DJ sets? Second, how widespread are the phenomena considered here, and how broadly applicable are the approaches put forth to the various genres of electronic dance music? Third, since EDM is first and foremost dance music, what is the relationship of dance to these rhythmic and metrical phenomena?
[39] Each of these questions is a potentially vast topic unto itself, and further research is needed before definitive answers can be given. Instead of trying to answer these questions at this time, I will leave them for future studies of electronic dance music to address. Nonetheless, I believe that these issues, in combination with the phenomena already discussed, suggest something of the range and complexity that electronic dance music offers to listeners and scholars, both within music theory and without.