Glitch Music: Intentionally Low Quality?

Today, electronic is an extremely popular genre of music. In the younger generations, electronic music seems to be right up there in the charts with pop and rap. Generally electronic is defined as any music that is predominantly computer-generated. As the definition is very vague, electronic music is such an incredibly broad genre that it would be impossible to narrow the genre down to a single song to describe. So instead, we'll talk about glitch.

Glitch is one of many sub-genres of electronic music that has arisen. The defining characteristics of glitch music (as the name might suggest) are the uses of subtle "glitches" as ornamentation and using glitchy-sounding synths throughout the music. Obviously, having glitch noises or glitchy-sounding synths be the primary focus of any song would get very annoying, very quickly. The goal of glitch music is to have glitchy elements serve as a light "seasoning" to enhance the overall feel the music creates.

So at this point you probably have absolutely no idea what a "glitch" would be like in music, or how a "glitchy" synth is different from any other synth in electronic music. To help illustrate this, I'll use a piece from one of my favorite electronic groups, The Glitch Mob. It is entitled "Fortune Days". This, by the way, is most enjoyable to listen to on a fancy audio system.

In the first 18 seconds of the piece the main harmony is introduced. It is a very simple little harmony, but is made interesting by the sudden, out of time, very brief breaks in between some notes. Listening to it the first time, I had thought that my music player freaked out, but as it repeats consistently in the same place you realize that it was indeed the artist's intention. The little "glitches" add emphasis to a normally dull line. At 0:18 a new synth is introduced on top of the old one. It is very high-pitched and choppy, and is not clear. Rather, it sounds very murky due to very rapid vibrations in the pitch, almost as if it were being played from a very old audio system or bad speakers. This gives it almost a vintage feel to it. The main melody plays at about 0:37 and provides us with a break from the glitchy sounding elements previously playing in the piece. From this point on, the piece simply makes minor developments to the already existent themes. 2:18 has a notable synth that is very fuzzy in quality, also suggesting playing from a low (or vintage) quality audio system.

"Fortune Days" by The Glitch Mob is characteristic of a lot of glitch music in that it utilizes intentionally low-quality sounding synths and random glitches to add a vintage kind of feeling to the music. You wouldn't think people would strive to put glitches or lower fidelity synths into their music, but this genre shows that these qualities can sometimes enhance music rather than limit it.

Japanese Pop: Catchy Oceans Away

When most of us think about pop music, what comes to mind almost always tends to be american. Even if we can think of music produced outside of the United States, it is still sung in the English language. This is primarily due to the fact that English is the third most spoken language in the world. We may be biased as English is the most spoken language in the United States by far, yet what we normally consider as pop music is also considered pop in many other countries around the world. On my first trip to Germany, I was surprised to find that all of the songs I had been hearing on FM radio stations in the states were the same songs on radio stations in Europe. But for a few exceptions, american pop music is huge all over the world. However, it is not the only pop music in the world...

Pop music is an abbreviation for popular music, and very simply gets its name from being the most popular music of our time. Most pop music is a part of western culture, but I would like to discuss Japanese pop, or as it is more commonly referred to as: "J-Pop". Pop music is extremely difficult to define as it is very eclectic. However, we can say that pop music is generally very catchy, repetitive, and up-beat. Pop music is geared towards a very large audience, so the pop music that is most successful is the music that easily gets stuck in a persons head. This is true for western pop, Japanese pop, and every other variant we could come up with.

I would like to discuss the song "Crossing Field" by LiSA (pictured above). LiSA is a relatively new Japanese pop singer, entering the music scene just in 2011. In just one year she managed to become popular enough in Japan to produce the song (or as I like to call "piece") "Crossing Field" for the extremely popular anime Sword Art Online.

Like the majority pop music typical today, the piece follows a very strict structure. It has an introduction, a verse, a chorus, a verse, a chorus, a bridge, and a final chorus. The piece starts out with a suppressed electronic harmony that develops into the main background for the singer very early in the piece, gradually fading in from nothing. These first ten seconds serve as the introduction. LiSA then begins singing her first verse within the first 15 seconds of the song, and it does not take long at all for the chorus to be introduced at 0:43. She then writes different lyrics for another verse (1:26), and returns to the chorus once again (2:00). In order to not bore the listener, a bridge is necessary (2:32). A bridge is a unique portion of a piece designed to give the listener a break from the chorus as to prevent the song from getting tired. After a very refreshing bridge the listener is once again ready to hear the chorus for one last time. As this is the final repetition, it must serve as the climax of the entire piece. In order to do this LiSA gradually gains intensity from (3:00) to around (3:12) and inserts a pause right at (3:12) so that when the chorus comes back it is an explosion of built up energy, suitable to end the piece. At the end of the final chorus, the music fades out to nothing just as it had faded in at the beginning. This structure maximizes the catchiness of the piece, and is thus very popular in all pop music.

Popular music can come in a wide variety of different approaches, but is generally marketed to a large audience and needs a structure to maximize the catchiness of the piece. Although we mainly think of western pop music, the same principles hold true for other kinds of popular music in other cultures as well.

Classical Music: Still Relevant

In our world of music, there are more genres than we can count, each one taking our ideas of music to completely different interpretations. If prompted to list musical genres that are still being developed, the vast majority of people would be able to come up with a plethora of different styles. Although we might not have ever explored them, we would certainly be able to list them on our fingers. However, perhaps a lot of people would not come up with classical music as a genre being developed today. This is not the case. In the sixteenth century, classical music was huge. Today it is nowhere near as popular as it once was, but this does not mean that it no longer produced.

Classical music is officially defined as "conventional music following long-established principles". I personally hate this definition. Perhaps the classical music we usually think of by Bach, Beethoven, and other composers of that time would follow this definition, but a ton of classical music would not. To use an extreme example, The Rite of Spring, by Igor Stravinsky in the early twentieth century, was so controversial that at its first showing, riots were formed in the streets from patrons that had become furious with the very nonconventional musical material in the piece. I urge you to listen to selections of this piece, but shall not include it in the post as it is indeed a 100-year old piece. Examples of breaking away from the norm in classical music is quite common, so perhaps a better definition would be "instrumental music with one or many predominantly acoustic instruments".

Today there are many musicians who continue the tradition of classical music, but I shall focus specifically on my favorite, Ludovico Einaudi (pictured above). Einaudi is specifically a pianist, but writes many other parts for his songs as well. Notably, Einaudi also incorporates soft, ambient electronics in a few of his songs, but we would still consider him as a classical artists, as the emphasis is indeed placed on the acoustic instruments, while the electronics are used to create ambience. The piece below is his newest work to date, entitled Night. (In classical music we call an individual musical idea a "piece of music" rather than a "song". I tend to like to refer to all "songs" as "pieces" as I believe that the latter term does a much better job describing music as the art that it is.)

Night starts off with its very ambient electronic harmony, but within the first thirty seconds the melody is introduced on the classical piano which is the first introduction of "purpose" in the piece. As the piano gains momentum towards 1:30, strings are then introduced. The strings serve to advance the melody that the piano had established earlier by adding a greater layer of depth. Finally at around 2:40 the full idea of the piece is achieved. Where the beginning of the piece was generally ambiguous, this new section is explicitly clear with its faster and louder moving notes. The rest of the piece restates the ideas from before to add emphasis, until it ends abruptly. The abrupt ending leaves the piece almost hanging in the air, left for us to reflect upon. This piece, like many others in the genre, is an idea that is gradually developed, perhaps like a story. In this sense a piece is an experience, rather than a catchy tune.

Classical music is by no means dead. Artists all over the world are still expressing their ideas in this very old genre of music, some with considerable success. Classical music is (in many people's opinions) still just as good as it has been, and should never be overlooked.