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In the 1980s, the industry marketed the compact disc as a symbol of eternal, mathematically flawless sound. In response, Japanese avant-garde artist Yasunao Tone applied translucent tape to a CD, forcing the player's error-correction system to go crazy and generate unpredictable screeching (Techno Eden, 1985). In the 1990s, the German project Oval made this approach musical: Markus Popp cut discs with a scalpel, assembling melancholic ambient soundscapes from the resulting "stutters" (the album 94diskont, 1995). Glitch was born not from the capabilities of new synthesizers, but from physical violence against the medium.

In 2000, Kim Cascone cemented the term "aesthetics of failure" for this phenomenon. While Silicon Valley engineers spent millions on noise-reduction algorithms, glitch musicians made digital trash the center of their compositions. Hard drive clicks, clipping, quantization noise, and harsh micro-cuts of waveforms without observing the "zero-crossing" rule — which hit the speakers with dry digital clicks — became their working material. Released in 2000 on the Mille Plateaux label, the manifesto compilation Clicks & Cuts finally turned the defects of DSP processing into an independent musical language.

Soon, the aesthetics of failure broke out onto the dancefloors. The Viennese label Mego (Fennesz, Farmers Manual) turned computer crashes into algorithmic noise, while the duo Autechre used the Max/MSP environment to create systems where the author's role was reduced to observing the mutation of data. Japanese minimalist Ryoji Ikeda took reductionism to the absolute, generating glitches from arrays of raw data and high frequencies on the verge of physical pain.

The apotheosis of hidden digital meanings was a stunt by Aphex Twin. In the track "Equation" (known as [Formula]), he hid his own face inside the sound wave. If you run the end of the track through a spectrogram, the creepy, grinning face of Richard D. James clearly emerges in the high frequencies — a ghost in the machine.