USER ERROR

A CAUTIONARY TALE IN SEVEN STATES

AI Process/Open Source Software: HUMAN, Google Flow Music, Claude.ai, ChatGPT, Meta.ai, Perchance.org – DAW: Audacity 4 (alpha), OS: Linux (Ubuntu 26.04)

Google Deep Dive Podcast: The Human-Machine Failure Cycle

USER ERROR – Full System Process Log (2:07:46)

Stream/Download Free Full System Process Log

Liner Note from Creator, JJ:

With over forty years as a composer, a degree in Creative Writing, and fourteen years of teaching high school English/Language Arts, I know a song or album is only as good as its narrative arc and all multimedia organically should stem from that seed. But when I title a piece of fiction, I wait until the larger project is complete, and then in a way I reverse engineer the title, to be the most fitting of the arc.

This time I stepped further back into the essence, starting not with the story, but the mere title, in this case, “USER ERROR.” In short, that damned blue-screen of death message, “USER ERROR” is when the map gets blamed for the driver taking a wrong turn with the steering wheel in their own capable hands. I wanted to take one for the team.

Below is the dialog I had with Claude.ai to that end:

JJ:

I want to develop, with you, my next musical project. There is a twist. For once I am basing all on the title: user error. I want it to be a full on glitch, futuristic atmosphere of not songs, but pieces of sound. No lyrics. No flow. Not listening music, but a surreal sonic experience.

What are your thoughts?

Claude:

What a compelling concept. “User Error” as a title is already doing a lot of work — it sits right at the intersection of technology, blame, and human frailty. There’s something darkly funny and deeply unsettling about it at the same time.

Here are my honest reactions and where I think this could go:

The title as a structural principle

“User Error” isn’t just a theme — it could be the logic of the whole project. Systems that almost work. Processes that initiate and fail mid-execution. The sound equivalent of a spinning cursor, a corrupted file, a dialog box with no button to close it. Each piece could embody a different type of failure — not random chaos, but specific malfunctions. That specificity is what separates interesting glitch from noise.

What makes glitch art actually land

The best glitch work (Oval, Autechre’s harsher moments, Arca, even Oneohtrix Point Never) works because there’s an underlying order being violated. The listener senses the ghost of structure underneath the fracture. Without that implied order, it’s just texture. With it, it becomes genuinely disorienting — because your brain keeps reaching for the resolution and not finding it.

The “pieces of sound” framing is important

Calling them pieces rather than tracks is the right instinct. It sets listener expectation correctly and gives you permission to work in durations and shapes that songs can’t. Something could be 47 seconds. Something could be 11 minutes of almost-imperceptible drift.

A tension worth sitting with

Surreal sonic experience vs. listenable — these aren’t opposites, but there’s a real question of entry points. Even the most abrasive work usually has one moment that pulls you in before it challenges you. Do you want any of that, or is full immersion/rejection the point?

Where are you starting from — do you have sounds, tools, a mood board? Or are we still in pure concept space?

JJ:

Pure concept space. I am listening to YOU…

Claude:

That’s a real invitation, so let me think out loud seriously.

The core idea I’d build everything around:

The machine expected a human. The human didn’t behave correctly. But who decided what “correct” was?

“User Error” is always the system protecting itself from blame. That’s the emotional core hiding inside what sounds like a technical title. There’s accusation in it. Deflection. And underneath that — the quiet horror of being measured and found wrong.

That’s not a concept you explain. You make people feel it.

How the project could be structured

Not an album. Not a playlist. Think of it more like a system with states.

Seven to nine pieces. Each one is a different mode of failure:

Boot — something trying to start. Never quite completing.

Input Not Recognized — repetition that mutates. The same gesture, misread, over and over, each time slightly more wrong.

Latency — time behaving badly. Events arriving out of sequence. Cause following effect.

Memory Leak — something beautiful, slowly consuming everything else until there’s nothing left.

Fatal Exception — the one moment of violence in the whole project. Brief. Unexplained.

Idle — unsettling stillness. The machine waiting. Watching.

Restore Point — ends where something began. But not quite the same place.

The sonic language

No traditional rhythm. But pulse — irregular, interrupted, biological-feeling rather than mechanical. The paradox of glitch music done right is that it should feel more human than clean music, not less.

Sounds I’d want in this world: corrupted field recordings, the inner sound of hardware under stress, synthesis that’s been given instructions it can’t fully execute, silences that feel load-bearing.

The one rule I’d propose

Every piece should have one moment where something almost resolves — a near-melody, a pulse that almost locks in, a texture that almost becomes comfortable — and then doesn’t. That almost is where the whole project lives.

What resonates? What feels wrong? Both reactions are useful.

JJ:

THAT resonates!

<end>

P.S. For the numerologists, the “mix” is a state of seven separate processing states, beginning to tragic end, each subdivided into seven phases. 7X7.

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USER ERROR

No lyrics. No flow. Not listening music.

A surreal sonic experience.

PREMISE

The machine expected a human. The human didn’t behave correctly.

But who decided what “correct” was?

User Error is always the system protecting itself from blame. There is accusation in it. Deflection. And underneath that — the quiet horror of being measured and found wrong.

That is not a concept to explain. It is a feeling to engineer.

THE ONE RULE

Every piece must contain one moment where something almost resolves —

a near-melody, a pulse that almost locks in, a texture that almost becomes comfortable —

and then doesn’t.

// The almost is where the whole project lives.

SONIC LANGUAGE

No traditional rhythm. But pulse — irregular, interrupted, biological-feeling rather than mechanical.

The paradox of glitch work done right: it should feel more human than clean music, not less. You are not building walls of noise. You are building a system that almost breathes.

MATERIAL TO DRAW FROM

Corrupted field recordings — familiar sounds made wrong.

The inner sound of hardware under stress — not performance, actual distress.

Synthesis given instructions it cannot fully execute — the output of incomplete commands.

Silences that feel load-bearing — absence as event, not gap.

// The best glitch has the ghost of structure underneath the fracture.

// Without implied order, it is just texture. With it, it becomes genuinely disorienting.

THE SEVEN STATES

Not an album. Not a playlist. A system with states.

Each state is prefaced by a .wav sound effect generated by ChatGPT, prompted by the same state prompt. The final sound effect of the piece, following the seventh state, is user shutdown after error.

The system is intended to be experienced by the listener in one sitting, the entire 45:07 sequence, cold boot to system termination.

01 — BOOT

something trying to start. never quite completing.

Initiating. Initiating. Initiating. The piece exists entirely in the space before function — the hum of capacitors charging, tones assembling themselves toward something that never arrives. Duration indeterminate. The listener should not be sure it has begun.

// Emotional register: anticipation turned hollow.

02 — INPUT NOT RECOGNIZED

repetition that mutates. the same gesture, misread, over and over.

A single sonic event — a breath, a keystroke, a word stripped of meaning — submitted to the system again and again. Each iteration returns a slightly different failure. The corruption is not random. It accumulates. By the end, the original event is unrecognizable, and you cannot locate the moment it became so.

// Emotional register: the frustration of not being understood.

03 — LATENCY

time behaving badly. cause following effect.

Events arrive out of sequence. A sound’s reverb precedes its source. Silence falls before the impact that caused it. The piece builds a world where chronology has failed quietly — not with violence, but with a persistent, low-grade wrongness. The listener’s brain will keep correcting. It should never fully succeed.

// Emotional register: dread without object.

04 — MEMORY LEAK

something beautiful, slowly consuming everything else.

The longest piece. A single texture — almost melodic, genuinely lovely — enters and begins to expand. Slowly at first. Other elements contract around it. By two-thirds of the way through, the beautiful thing has taken everything. What remains is silence, or near-silence, still faintly carrying the shape of what consumed it. A haunting, not a disaster.

// Emotional register: the thing you love that becomes the problem.

05 — FATAL EXCEPTION

the one moment of violence in the whole project.

The shortest piece. No buildup. No resolution. Something breaks — fully, without apology — and then it is over. Its function is structural: it tells the listener that the project was capable of this the entire time. Everything before it was restraint. Everything after it is aftermath.

// Emotional register: shock, then the strange calm of irreversibility.

06 — IDLE

unsettling stillness. the machine waiting. watching.

The machine is not off. It is between tasks. The piece is made of what systems produce when they are not performing for you — the hiss, the clock, the low-frequency presence of readiness. The listener should feel observed. Not threatened. Observed. There is a difference, and the difference is the piece.

// Emotional register: the awareness of being data.

07 — RESTORE POINT

ends where something began. but not quite the same place.

The system attempts to return to a prior state. Elements from earlier pieces surface — not as quotation, but as corrupted memory. The boot sequence from the first piece is here, slightly wrong. The repetition of the second is here, but the original event has been lost entirely. The piece does not conclude. It simply stops attempting.

// Emotional register: you can’t go back. you’re not where you started. you’re somewhere close.

A NOTE ON STRUCTURE

These are not tracks. They do not require sequencing in order, though the logic of the sequence is intentional — Boot to Restore Point is a system completing its failure cycle.

Durations are not predetermined. A piece is done when its failure is complete. That might be 47 seconds. It might be eleven minutes. The work tells you.

There are no lyrics because there is nothing to say. The machine does not speak in language. It speaks in state.

USER ERROR // CONCEPT DOCUMENT // V.1

error not yours. or entirely yours.