Glitch's defining distinction is deliberate engineered failure versus accidental malfunction

The central philosophical distinction in glitch production is between accidental failure (equipment malfunctions on its own) and deliberate failure (the artist engineers the malfunction and shapes it as material). This is what separates glitch as an art form from merely broken equipment. In its earliest form the genre relied on physical manipulation of hardware: Yasunao Tone’s ‘wounded’ CDs used tape on disc surfaces to interrupt data reading; Oval’s Markus Popp damaged disc surfaces and reconstructed the skips into loops; Nicolas Collins adapted a CD player so recordings could be altered live. In every case the intent — engineering and curating the error — is what makes it composition rather than accident.

Examples

Popp’s damaged-CD workflow: score/paint the disc surface, feed the resulting skips into a sampler, reconstruct them into rhythmic loops. Tone’s tape-on-CD produced pitched read-error artifacts reproducible only by that method.

Assessment

State the distinction glitch draws between accidental and deliberate failure, and explain why the same skipping-CD sound counts as art in one case and a fault in the other.