Post-Digital Music
Revised 2024
What does it mean to compose with a system that stutters? With tools that crash, loop, mishear, or misfire? What does it mean to treat failure not as an interruption, but as a material?
Post-digital music doesn’t just foreground glitch - it treats it as foundational. It doesn’t hide the machine. It lets it speak, collapse, insist.
This chapter explores how post-digital aesthetics operate in practice - how artefact becomes form, how systems become collaborators, and how sound asserts itself as vibrational object, not just signal or style.
The Artefact as Object
In post-digital composition, artefacts aren’t errors to be corrected. They’re the source material.
Clicks, dropouts, truncated buffers - all of these become compositional elements. A damaged CD becomes a rhythm generator. A misaligned sample becomes a new phrase.
This isn’t a novelty move. It’s an ontological one. These artefacts reveal the limits of the system - its breaking points, its friction, its noise floor.
Oval’s 94diskont, for example, loops fragments of CD glitches into shimmering textures.¹ But the music isn’t just glitchy - it listens to the glitch, follows it, lets it repeat until it forms a pattern.
The artefact becomes not a trace of failure, but a sonic object - autonomous, affective, real.
Resisting the Poietic Fallacy
In computer music, it’s tempting to privilege the method - to assume that the algorithm, patch, or process explains the work.
This is the poietic fallacy: the belief that how something was made defines what it is.
But sound resists this. It leaks. It exceeds its source.
A glitch patch isn’t interesting because of its cleverness - it’s interesting because of what it produces, how it feels, how it moves.
Christoph Cox’s sonic materialism argues for attending to sound as force - not as symbol, but as vibrational flux.²
To listen, then, is not to decode, but to encounter. Not to explain, but to describe.
Glitch as Force
Steve Goodman calls sound a form of “unsound” - force that acts on bodies, bypassing cognition.³
In this frame, the glitch isn’t just a sonic hiccup. It’s a vibrational event. It hits, interrupts, resets the nervous system.
Post-digital music uses this tactically. Sudden cuts, bursts of static, sub-bass that rattles the chest - these aren’t aesthetic effects. They’re affective pulses.
They remind us that listening is physical. That sound is a medium of power.
Glitch becomes a way of touching that power - not abstractly, but viscerally.
AI, Delegated Emergence, and Machinic Drift
Recent post-digital practices involve machine learning systems - not to perfect sound, but to let systems drift.
AI-generated compositions (like those from OpenAI’s Jukebox or Holly Herndon’s Spawn) don’t reproduce style - they mutate it. They reveal how systems listen differently.
These systems learn patterns, but they also misinterpret, glitch, hallucinate.
In post-digital hands, this becomes a compositional tool. Not for outsourcing creativity, but for collaborating with nonhuman listening.
This isn’t aleatoric in the Cagean sense. It’s delegated emergence: allowing systems to generate behaviours, then composing with their output as sonic object.
The goal isn’t control. It’s response.
Beyond Nostalgia
There’s a risk that glitch aesthetics become style - nostalgic gestures toward a time when digital sound was still surprising.
But the strongest post-digital works avoid this. They don’t replicate the artefact - they work with its logic.
They treat sound not as decoration, but as consequence - of systems, processes, bodies.
This is not a return to lo-fi. It’s an advance toward infra-fi - listening to what lies beneath the interface.
As Salomé Voegelin puts it, “The digital is not a ghost. It is a residue. It is what remains.”⁴
Post-digital music composes with what remains.
Conclusion
Post-digital composition doesn’t explain. It doesn’t clarify. It vibrates.
It’s not just about how sound is made, but how it emerges. Not just how it’s received, but how it acts.
Sound, here, becomes an object - not of study, but of relation. It glitches, loops, resonates, resists.
In the next chapter, we map these sonic objects more closely - not to decode them, but to trace their behaviours. To listen for their logic.
Footnotes
- Oval (1995) 94diskont. Mille Plateaux [CD].
- Cox, C. (2011) ‘Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism’, Journal of Visual Culture, 10(2), pp. 145-161.
- Goodman, S. (2010) Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Voegelin, S. (2018) The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening. London: Bloomsbury.