Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Glitch

This week I attempted to recreate the results of glitching files as demonstrated in this blog post by Trevor Owens. As we shall see, I ran into a few difficulties in reproducing this experiment exactly. But first what is a glitch? According to Wikipedia, “A computer glitch is the failure of a system, usually containing a computing device, to complete its functions or to perform them properly.” In this post, I chronicle my attempts to create glitches by using files in ways other than their intended purpose to reveal what we can learn about the formats themselves.

A Textual Audio Experience

I started trying to view an .mp3 as a .txt file. I could not use the same audio file as in the original blog post because the Library of Congress does not provide direct download any longer, having switched to streaming-only for access. Instead, I randomly selected an .mp3 of the Rush classic Tom Sawyer. From here I changed the file extension to a .txt file and opened it with my computer’s text editor. Here is the result:

Just as with the audio file Owens used, much of the information in the .mp3 is a confused mess and the result of the text editor’s attempt at interpreting the bits as alphanumeric sequences. However, along the top there is some embedded metadata such as information on the writers of the song: Alex Lifeson, Geddy Lee, Neil Pert, and Pye Dubois. These bits are meant to be read as text and therefore can be read by the program.

Where the Trouble Began

In the next step, I tried to view an .mp3 and .wav file as .raw images. Because I did not use the same audio file as the original blog post, I did not have a .wav file to accompany my .mp3 when trying to replicate this part. Rather than simply changing the extension on my Tom Sawyer .mp3 I used a media encoder and converted the file to a .wav file. From here, I changed the extension on each to .raw and attempted to view them in an image editor. Unfortunately these files would not open in any of my image editing software. Borrowing a computer that had Photoshop, I was able to view the results seen below:

Just as above, an image editor can do no better than a text editor when attempting to read the audio files in a visual manner. Unlike Owens’s results, my two images look largely the same. The .wav as .raw did produce a large black bar at the top of image, which I am assuming is due to the difference in original format. I thought the similarity might have been because I converted my .mp3 into a .wav, so I downloaded a different .wav audio file directly from the web and repeated the steps and yet it still yielded the same results.

Complete Failure

While I was able to replicate most of the outcomes in the preceding section, I failed at the next step of editing an image with a text editor. The link Owens listed for the image in his post was broken, but luckily the original image was also available in the post. I downloaded this image and changed the extension from .jpg to .txt. I opened the file in the text editor, deleted some of the text, and changed it back it into a .jpg. Unfortunately, the file would not open in any of the image software I tried, including Photoshop. I kept receiving error messages that the file was unsupported, corrupted, etc. I tried these steps again but with copying and pasting parts of the text back into itself or even deleting only one character. I even attempted using a different image entirely and doing all the same steps again. Alas, all my attempts failed to produce a glitched image that could open.

Conclusions

While I was not able to reproduce all the tasks that Owens accomplished in his blog post, I was still able to see his main point that screen essentialism masks that digital objects are more than what they appear to be on the screen. The different ways the files can be read demonstrates the different structures of the formats, even if they look the same on the screen. My failure in this process has made me realize how much the public is pushed to a limited understanding and shielded by the programs that are meant to read certain files in certain ways. Perhaps my failures are just a result of well working computer software that allows you only to produce the desired outcome of these files. I encourage everyone to try glitching some files. Can you do it?

UPDATE: I was able to fix the problems I mentioned in this post. Here are the results:

To see how my issues were fixed, see the comments section below. Many thanks to Nick Krabbenhoeft for helping me fix the problems.