Glitch music is a genre of electronic music which arose from the exploration of failure (http://www.noiseforlight.com/constrat/read/cascone.pdf)
Extreme time stretching and bit-crushing (resampling at a much lower sample rate) are examples of glitch techniques. It is the deliberate placing of musical focus on digital imperfections. Audio-mosaicing is inherently glitchy. It is founded on technologies which do not yet work perfectly and so errors in the analysis (e.g. pitch detection in polyphonic audio, onset detection in non-percussive material), produce \emph{glitchy} mosaics.
This composition evolved as an attempt to use digital glitches (imperfect mosaics of imperfect takes) to evoke human glitches (imperfect memory) by integrating mosaics into a fairly typically structured acoustic song (ABABC).

The material for this composition was captured in a lo-fi manner. One can hear many clicks and discontinuities in the source audio, which was recorded on a Tascam DR-2D digital field recorder. Four tracks were recorded - Bodhran (An Irish frame drum}, Nylon String Guitar, Lead Vocals, Backing Vocals. The tracks were sequenced in a digital audio workstation called Ardour2. The main 4 tracks were compressed and the lead vocal was treated with the Gong Model plugin by Steve Harris. This is a weird and wonderful effect which imparts a fabulous sibilance to the higher frequencies in the spectrum. The finished track has been left rough intentionally, even the song itself is somehow unfinished. It was not mastered as such, just normalised and compressed in Audacity, a digital audio editor.

The out-takes, those takes which were deemed as not good enough for inclusion in the finished song, were compiled into source corpora, where they were segmented and analysed. These out-takes contain errors or glitches, which meant they were discarded. The aim of this exercise was to try and use this glitchy material and incorporate it into the finished project, rather than discarding it. The theme of the song is nostalgic to a certain extent. Nostalgia implies a rose-tinted view of some past period in time and it arises out of glitches in human memory. It is not an objective recollection of how things really were. In this way, it felt suitable to ornament the song with musical glitches, to imitate what happens in our brain when we indulge ourselves in nostalgic recollections of a 'better' time.

The targets for the mosaic were the final four tracks selected for the composition. The first appearance of the mosaic is in the solo, the material here was created by mosaicing guitar out-takes from the lead vocal target and mosaicing vocal out-takes from the guitar target.
After this solo, the mosaics begin to be woven in and out of the audio, an additional mosaic draws from the bodhran out-takes with the guitar track as a target. This creates a bodhran rhythm synced to the beat of the guitar, which produces some interesting syncopations when mixed in with the main bodhran track.
The mosaic audio was not processed, with the exception of the bodhran mosaic, which was treated with \emph{Barry's Satan Maximiser} plug-in, in order to make it a little more aggressive. Volume and panning automation in ardour was utilised in order to weave the mosaic audio in and out of the mix.

The author has a sneaking suspicion that the song is not actually that good, however he still likes the idea and considers that the effect of these mosaics would not be so easy to create by alternative means.

Out-take Mosaic

A jam around a little progression I'd come up with took place on a night of El Clásico in a flat near Arc de Triomf. I was playing guitar, hooked up to a chaos pad, played by Marius Miron. Carlos G. Román was playing a hand-held digital percussion thing and the telly was playing the match. A field recorder sitting on the coffee table captured the proceedings. 
This track uses that recording as source audio. A drum loop was added and some time-stretching, pitch-shifting and granulation ensued. I laid down some bass and vocals, followed by a short burst of mosaicing to finish it off. Software used includes Ardour, Jack, Jamin and Pure Data.

El Clásico

This track was made using reactable mobile for android. I deliberately restricted myself to just using a couple of the demo loops that come with the app as I wanted to explore the creative possibilities for composing a tune using this tabletop paradigm.  This tune is really all about the performance on the table but you'd have to actually buy the app to see that ;)
My profile on the reactable community is here: http://www.reactable.com/community/artist/3065
You can download the original table from there if you have the application installed on ios/android

greenguerilla

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