When I was in high school our amateur jazz band went into a recording studio to make a fun keepsake album. My memory is fairly hazy, but the whole experience was a lot of fun! Everybody got their microphones and a headset. Maybe we recorded by sections and likely with a metronome track.
When we finished we got to go watch the sound guys at work. They meticulously gridified and autotuned every note. After it was all over I got the cd, I listened to my favorite tracks that I got to spend the semester playing with my friends, and it had no resemblance to what I knew our group to be. I think I threw the album away.
When I've talked to people about modern music in the past, it's only ever people who play music, or who have an intense interest in it, that seem to even be aware that the vast majority of modern music is autotuned (and "gridified" as this author puts it).
You hear but you don't recognize it. Rick Beato has a clip where he takes Jogn Bonham's drums from Led Zeppelin and gridifies them. As a non-musician, I can feel the soul being sucked out of the song in the process.
It's easy to take one of the greatest drummer's performances, quantize things, make it worse, and say "quantization sucks the soul out of music."
But what about the non-greatest drummers? The other 99.9% (or higher) of musicians who are tiers below Bonham? Quantization is a net improvement. It takes unlistenable performances and makes them listenable.
Pfft - this doesn't make a general point about quantisation - he completely altered the drum part. He didn't just shift things by minute amounts to hit the "exact" timing while maintaining the swing. Of course if you remove swing then it's completely changed - it could also be quantized while maintaining swing.
Lack of awareness does not mean that it doesn't impact how the music is received. Non-musician not having the knowledge and skills for analysis does not mean it makes no difference to them.
It's like a non-cook not realising the role of MSG in a dish: despite the lack of awareness, they wouldn't enjoy the dish as much without the MSG
To jump on that analogy: Try telling normal people that all (almost all?) restaurant food uses loads of salt. They will tell you "That's fine; I don't want bland food!"
Man fuck that. Audio engineers lost their minds snapping all these live performances. One thing to make dance music on the grid but a live high school band?
As the “exception that proves the rule”, there’s a fair bit of dance music that intentionally goes off grid to either build tension or sound more organic. There are even entire subgenres dedicated to sampling more acoustic and traditional instruments (usually percussion) while embracing underengineered sound.
I’m a lifelong musician and producer who has been experimenting a lot with Suno for music creation this year.
It’s been interesting to notice that Suno-generated tracks have all kinds of subtle tempo drift, and the tempo maps look very similar to the irregularities shown in the article, at least from a numerical perspective. I have actually spent a lot of time quantizing AI-generated tracks to the grid (to aid chopping/editing), even creating automations that do it for me now when I ingest Suno tracks into Ableton for follow-up production work.
Unknown to me whether this is
A) an emergent “imperfection” fundamental to the model and its training dataset, or
B) something Suno intentionally injects to “humanize” their output,
but knowing that low-effort Suno-generated tracks are currently flooding music distributors, I think it’s ironic that the same factor the author describes as exemplifying the very humanity of recorded music may also be one of the biggest tells that a song was AI-generated, for music being released today.
That's partially why Burial's first album brought such a fresh air to the music scene. He didn't use a DAW, but a plain, boring audio editor Sony Sound Forge and adjusted his samples until the groove and the tones felt right.
I've also seen produces complain that the default BPM is 120 so they start there and later realize that it should have been changed. Minor annoyance, but it reveals the importance of defaults.
I just find a lot of modern music... boring. It feels perfect but just isn't interesting.
In contrast, when I check out older music from less successful musicians, it's often very imperfect; both in that it's boring, but in that there's little talent there.
Or, to translate: Gridification is modern style that doesn't make up for lack of talent; and ironically masks the talent that used to be there.
Related: I suggest checking out some of the newer Lemon Twigs albums. They're decent songwriters and excellent musicians. They went 100% analog on their most recent album, which I initially thought was a gimmick, until I read this article.
Another recommendation is jazz music. Modern music, and especially modern pop music, is incredibly harmonically simple. You rarely hear anything beyond a 7th chord. But step into jazz and all of sudden you're hearing augmented, diminished, and other more complicated chords and sounds that in just a raw way sound more complex and interesting than a lot of modern music. (Classical is even more out there, but that's a harder sell in 2026 unfortunately)
> It is because modern music production now treats human temporal particularity as error in need of correction.
I was thinking about this the other day as I was playing guitar adding slight pauses and swings to what I was playing. The imperfection makes things so much more interesting and fun imo.
I've always found stuff about how technological/sociological advances beget changes in music really interesting. David Byrne's book 'How Music Works' covers this exact point about quantisation and much more.
I would argue that there's probably a lot more nuance here when you look at how economics of music have changed in the last 50 years - it's now so much cheaper and easier to produce and listen to music. There are millions of bedroom producers experimenting with production techniques, and the market for music is completely saturated with more good music than anyone could possible listen to. Record labels just can't compete when it comes to making interesting, creative music, however they can still win at marketing. I think the modern charts now are less determined by what resonated well with audiences, but rather what has been calculated to be the most 'marketable' kind of music, and I suppose a metronomic tempo is an easier sell in this regard.
Also worth noting: a perfect tempo makes a song a lot easier to remix, which can often gain the song a lot more exposure than the original edit.
> the kick and bass do not line up exactly. You never hear that in a contemporary pop mix anymore. That is not because musicians lost the ability to play together.
Why would losing the ability to play together cause the kick and bass to line up? This is the most forced claudism I've seen in a long time.
Looks like a standard editing mistake to me. The previous sentence probably used to say something like ‘musicians used to not be able to play together’ but when it was edited the editor forgot to update the next sentence for coherence. Editing long-form text is hard :)
>Why would losing the ability to play together cause the kick and bass to line up?
Because if they lost the ability to play together, then they would be forced to either overdub tracks played individually with a click track, OR use midi, in both of which cases the kick and bass typically lines up.
So what this say, is we get this exact "perfect line up" now, but not because musicians lost the ability to play together and sound naturally, but because we prefer these other two production techniques and audio processing that removes all natural nuance.
I can only make sense of it as "musicians are so bad at playing together that we don't try". If say the bass player cannot play with others I'm going to record them playing each chord/note in isolation, and then use that as midi samples to track. Do that to everything and you get perfectly lined up music. If you can play together "good enough" then I'm not going to do that.
I think its the difference between playing live, playing in parts and playing to a click track.
again these are not exclusive, Even though I fucking hate it, I can drum live to a click track. I hate it because everytime I am slightly off I can fucking hear it like being hit over the head with a frying pan.
The analysis is interesting, but I think the premise that human error is a defect to be corrected is flawed in that bands have consistently always strived to play in time together. Humans tolerate a certain amount of variance, and may even like it, but if you have a drummer who can't keep time, you don't have a band. Big Band music made it a spectacle of keeping so many instruments in time and tune with each other.
I think the thing that has changed is that the tools to "fix" the bugs are better and more commoditized, so they're used more. And similarly, production costs have gone down as hardware is commoditized, so there's more music to choose from. The last piece is that social media has made it popular to all like the same thing and make dance videos to the same songs, so already perfect little pop pieces climb up faster.
Its about musical production. This isn't the first time someone has done analysis of timing in modern music. I think I first saw an article on slashdot in around 2010.
Recording "live" can be hard. it requires a bigger studio, more equipment, better engineers and crucially, everyone to be there at the same time.
you can, if you have a click track, record everything separately, and then marry it up later. once you have the drums lined up, you can just replay the tracks you have without the click track.
this means that you can record separately, at different times, in different locations. or if its your bedroom, you can move stuff around to the microphone you have.
But if you record a track as parts, you can then edit it. You want it to sound good right? laptop power has increased significantly, so any plugin can be run in realtime on multiple tracks.
SOme music suits it, others doesn't.
I _love_ the sound of a live band who are playing well. I don't love the sound of a live band who aren't.
Its hard to play together well all the time, so click track gives you a better bang for buck.
I don't think we are talking being able to keep time, that is a given for any musician playing to be recorded.
What the article is talking about is the teeny tiny imperfections of hitting the notes/drums at the beat (or "grid").
I agree that the imperfections are overfixed to an inhuman level.
Interestingly, there is a "swing" or randomize feature available in some hardware and I guess in every DAW, so if the producers wanted, they would be able to "fix" the notes to a grid, and then add a perfectly calculated random touch to make it sound human.
The first example the article uses of the kick and bass is not a subtle imperfection. It's massive, almost a full 16th. That's middle school levels of imperfection. With pro musicians it's obviously a deliberate stylistic choice.
> The last piece is that social media has made it popular to all like the same thing
Social media definitely didn't invent this. I'm not overly familiar with what is popular on social media, but it seems like the internet has greatly expanded the viability of different styles and niche music. When I get together with friends, we all have tons of music than most of us haven't heard before.
> Big Band music made it a spectacle of keeping so many instruments in time and tune with each other.
"tight" big band music "in the pocket" is deliberately and consistently behind the beat.
Peggy Lee and other great singers are more in tune than auto-tune or any perfectly tuned instrument is. Modern tuning, aka equal temperament, is a compromise. Every key is perfectly identically subtly out of tune. A great singer will sing with natural tuning, adjusted on the fly for each key change. Peggy Lee would sing a third slightly flatter than an auto-tune will. Unless an instrument is also playing the third, in which case she would sing in unison with the instrument.
Most of us aren't Peggy Lee or the incredible studio musicians that came out of New Orleans. We need to learn the rules before we can break them.
Often I get a lot more out of some YouTuber/streamers's slightly scuffed cover of a song than the original studio recording. "Perfect" music often makes me feel nothing. It's the tiny individual mistakes and flourishes that make it easier to relate to the performer and music as a human - and that's what puts a smile on my face listening to it.
Battery 3 from Native Instruments is a drum sampler from around 2013. This is in the manual:
Remember, machines don’t kill music, people do—and quantization is one of the main weapons.
...
Quantizing everything is the quickest way to suck the life out of a piece of music.
Beautiful use of sound analysis tooling, and pretty much incontrovertible evidence. Love it! Maybe that's the thing that makes most pop songs completely uninteresting to me. It just makes me want to go watch live music even more.
I watched the other day Rick Beato's "What If Stairway To Heaven Came Out Today?" and what stroke me is that his granddaughter remarked that the song didn't have auto-tune. First, she has great musical ear. Second, she destroyed my illusion that "true" musical producers were in the business of zapping the singer whenever they went out of tune, not of using auto-tune, which is something more becoming of the plebeian musicians who make songs from their bedroom.
With that said, a silver lining of AI learning to imitate mainstream producers is that the (big players of the) music industry may finally lose their grip on people's musical taste. Maybe people will start searching for alternative styles, and going to their (minor artists with a unique voice) performances in person.
> With that said, a silver lining of AI learning to imitate mainstream producers is that the (big players of the) music industry may finally lose their grip on people's musical taste. Maybe people will start searching for alternative styles, and going to their (minor artists with a unique voice) performances in person.
I share the belief that this accelerated the rise of Angine de Poitrine, who use microtonal stringed instruments and uncommon time signatures. Both of those things have been around for a while, but never went viral.
Led Zeppelin was influenced by musical traditions that placed an emphasis on playing with intonation and rhythm as a technique for conveying emotion and creating musical tension. Producers back then would have known that, and known knot to mess with it even if they did have the tools back then.
But also, a perfected, highly produced sound is part of the aesthetic values of modern popular music. So producers who do it now aren’t necessarily wrong, either. They’re just following taste. If people start loving a loosey goosey White Stripes sound again, producers will go back to leaving it in.
When I was in highschool in the 90s, our school spent a ton of money on a set of midi keyboards hooked up to workstations, new technology at the time, and offered a class on digital music production. Our teacher was the school music director and I remember he was really excited.
The software had a quantization feature which he showed us how to use but he warned us not to use it on everything, because it makes music sound mechanical and less human. I guess that philosophy did not survive in the music industry.
I remember in the late 00s when making fun of autotune was a common joke, and a way to attack "bad" or "lazy" singers / musicians. Probably just because some bands were using it stylistically (T-Pain most notoriously).
It was around the same time there was a backlash against the (rather egregious) use of Photoshop in advertising. But for better or worse, in both cases, the use of these and similar tools have become ubiquitous, just in a way that's more subtle.
Nowadays, hearing a band that isn't pitch corrected and quantized to all hell is refreshing, similar to seeing an actor with imperfect teeth. It feels like, for probably a whole host of reasons, almost every art form has been trending toward removing all the imperfections that make human art feel "human" and interesting. I don't expect this will get better now that we have AI.
It's definitely extreme these days but it's been going on for quite a long time. Apart from live music, I really enjoy some recordings which were raw and largely untouched. Lilywhite Sessions is a perfect example (the original unmastered leak), and there are some really cool rehearsal tapes from Deep Purple floating around. I wish I could get the "as it was recorded" versions of some modern albums.
Well shoot, I snap-to-grid because while I make music that I love[1], my actual playing skills and timekeeping are poor -- I'm always a bit fast, hitting notes before the beat, even with a click track -- and without either automatic quantification or at least the ability to edit the timing to be more reasonable in post, my tracks would be worse.
Where in the binary dichotomy between "you're a real musician who uses human feel/timing to create art" and "you're a hopeless commercial grifter chasing perfection" do I fall?
Something seems strange about this publication. They're doing a lot of talking about machine perfection in music, but some of the articles have big chunks that read as 100% AI on Pangram, mainly “The Shame Machine” which is itself primarily about generative AI. However, I didn't observe that in the OP here, nor on the most recent post “The Climate Crisis Has A Music Problem”. Was that an early approach that's since been abandoned, or a dubious meta joke for that specific article, or what? And then the rest… clearly they have a thesis they want to keep harping on, and as someone with musical experience I'm empathetic with what seems to be the main throughline of it, but the Substack as a whole reads as being heavy propaganda for their particular certification, which is a scammy feel.
"we like music in the abstract as a series of numbers" seemed like a nod to AI or quantization general. Now, it might have just been genuine instead of an ironic statement. Also explains an unreadable-to-humans giant table in the middle of the article.
Also, an existing creative who understood and knew the topic would just call it what the rest of the industry calls it; quantization and autotune, not "gridification", that's some term they've seemingly made up together with Claude, and it sure sounds like it.
Maybe controversial, but this is why I don't like live performances. If tickets were cheap, maybe, but paying a high price to hear a mediocre reproduction of the digital copy I already have is a pass for me.
I literally do not care that someone can "hit high notes" or that "unlike this other artist, my favorite artist can actually sing." I'm listening to music, not grading music class students.
That tempo analysis graph is cool to see, showing the subtle fluctuation of "local tempo", rushing or leaning back intentionally. It's a sophisticated technique though, and I bet outside of pop music, like jazz musicians - especially drummers - still know how to do it; and seasoned listeners also know how to feel and appreciate it.
A great book tangential to this subject matter is Jaron Lanier's "you are not a gadget" which spends a substantial amount of time on the development of music in parallel to computers. My recollection is that midi basically became the dominant format because it was first, and it was first because it was more or less the most obvious way to represent music in a simple programmable format. Other formats that allow for more flexibility didn't crack through due to the critical mass of adoption of midi, so it persisted until today.
Some artists would consider the gridified recording as what they strive to achieve in practice.
Some artists would gridify recording so people who come to their concerts enjoy their plays with "errors" on purpose.
As humans, we don't want to be seen what we spent our entire life to be considered err'ed. I understand the pitcher perfectness in that regard, though I'd still like unpolished "rock/metal" music.
Now I can only enjoy those raw moments in concerts.
> Some artists would consider the gridified recording as what they strive to achieve in practice.
Sure. We would also consider it impossible to achieve in reality, and so the art is in the trying, and gridification removes the art. Hell, it removes the artist.
I've been wondering if we're going to end up with some kind of backlash against all the autotuning, 'gridification' as this article explains, etc etc., and AI slop as well as deepfakes filling up the interwebs. You can't know what's real anymore. So people will start preferring live performances. Not only live music, but, say, theater/musicals/opera instead of going to the movies, and so forth?
Not saying this as some kind of general "anti-AI" argument or anything. I'm not advocating for the Butlerian Jihad. I find AI a very useful tool, and I used it at work pretty much every day. But for art, which in a sense is a celebration of human creativity, something gets lost if we use AI to generate it, doesn't it?
This is largely pretty subgenre specific, though. For tech-death the robotic sound of quantized perfection is often a stylistic choice, it's literally a part of the appeal of the music for some people. (An obvious example is Archspire, not my cup of tea, but some people love that production style.)
I don't really hear the same thing as much in doom, black, or more extreme death variants.
This should be at the top of the thread. Metal might be the most obvious exemplar to an untrained ear.
When I hear a drum machine execute with microsecond level precision, I feel like I want to throw my computer through a window. It is instantaneous revulsion. There isn't a ponderous "gee I wonder if this is real/fake" phase of discovery. It's obviously fake and trash. Immediately. Every time.
Orchestral arrangements done the same way might be the only thing that is worse to my ear.
There are situations where having good timing is important, but you cannot put the entire thing on an atomic clock and call it "art".
> What modern production calls “correction,” and mistakes for care, is really a form of epistemic violence against the record of human beings objectifying felt time for our understanding.
I hope this was written as tongue in cheek, otherwise wow, you are taking yourself too seriously.
The entire premise of this essay rests on the idea that musical performances are necessarily played live (particularly, with a live drummer), in the tradition of rock music. This just qualitatively does not apply to much modern music, where drums are played by a machine or computer. Top on the '2025' list is two good examples from totally different genres: Kendrick Lamar (hip hop), and Billie Eilish (vocal-forward electronica).
Are electronica and hip hop worse for this? I suppose that's up for debate - but we now have multiple full generations of music listeners and critics who obviously, passionately love those genres, and they've been growing for decades. This is easy to see not just via charts but online discourse and the zeitgeist.
Do those genres 'groove' worse and feel less human? This is more subjective, and more debatable, but I would argue that hip hop has redefined what 'groove' can even mean, with its very off-the-grid, loose feel despite the technically very precise machine looping the beats (because producers nudge each beat off the grid, usually in very intentional ways, or play the beat in live then adjust it). And it's hard to argue that electronic dance music in its many forms hasn't made people move and connect with the music's rhythm in powerful ways, despite almost complete quantization in most dimensions.
I think purely looking at tempo stddev and not much else papers over these aspects a little much.
I agree purely looking at tempo variation isn't everything, but I think perhaps "Zero tempo variation is a necessary but not sufficient indicator of "gridifcation" is closer to the message?
More specifically, they define gridification as: recording multiple takes, nudging every single note onto the grid for each one, then selecting the best take section by section (however small those sections are) so that every single note is absolutely perfectly on time, in tune etc, loses... something - it removes some of the humanity. The author also explicitly cites many other kinds of recording and editing as NOT gridification - e.g. playing to a click, using a drum machine.
>The entire premise of this essay rests on the idea that musical performances are necessarily played live (particularly, with a live drummer), in the tradition of rock music. This just qualitatively does not apply to much modern music, where drums are played by a machine or computer
One could say modern music is not "musical performances" then. A sequencer or drum maching playing isn't "a performance", it's a programmed loop.
>Do those genres 'groove' worse and feel less human?
Drum machines are instruments. Even if sequenced, drum machines are live instruments and they require skill. It requires time to master. It's not only "programmed loop".
When I play the drum machine, I program it live. I never play the same thing twice. It IS a performance. It applies for both vintage drum machines (such as E-mu drumulator or tr808) and new gen ones or grooveboxes (such as Electribes or Octatracks).
On top of that, not all drum machines are created equal. There are whole genres based on 808s, 909s, 303s combined with these… using DINsync, which involves retriggering internal hardware clocks on the machines at trigger rise-time speed. rather than sending a succession of MIDI notes. That stuff is still 'electronic clocks' but not in the sense of 'lives on a computer that triggers notes', in the sense of 'sequencers firing notes very simultaneously'.
That's a timing lock that's tighter than the usual sort in recent generations. There are DAWs (Renoise) that pride themselves on being able to send MIDI with less slop and irregularity (nice trick since MIDI is a serial bus, but you'd think it'd be more common to get right). There are whole genres (see: psytrance) that do very well in trackers which can fire sample-accurate notes simultaneously without resorting to MIDI.
Even though it's of the machine, the groove of an 808/303 pair synced by DINsync is a different beast from 'snap to grid and autotune'. There's subtleties to everything.
> One could say modern music is not "musical performances" then. A sequencer or drum maching playing isn't "a performance", it's a programmed loop.
The drum machine is not all of the performance. In pop you'll have at the very least a singer. Even if all of the instrumental is machine-made, having a live singer definitely makes it a "performance".
I didn't feel like the article is being in any way judgemental of music created using perfect digital instruments. The author seems to be only against over-correcting human performances. So it was about all of the new ones being on the grid, rather than about each of them.
> And what about dance music? Isn’t that entirely gridified? No. Not by the definition being used by the Musical Form Institute.
>
> What!?
>
> The next essay will cover dance music.
>
> To recap: gridification is not playing to a timing reference. It is correcting human performances to a fixed grid after the fact.
I felt that the essay acknowledged differences in production between genres. Tempo is used as the main example, but they also mention vocal tuning as an example of gridification.
To err is human; to be flawless, artificial. I think people will appreciate this more as they become saturated by AI art.
What I want to know is what the author thinks of drum machines, with their mechanical perfection. Roland's very first product, the TR-77 drum machine, was released in 1972, in time for his 1975 comparison. They have been popular ever since.
> What hits me immediately is how perfect the vocals are. There are melodic leaps in the verse that are incredibly difficult to nail, and Bruno Mars is hitting every single note pitch-perfect and in absolutely perfect time.
Isn't every song recorded as every word singularly at a certain pitch? And timing done completely in the DAW instead of while recording.
Barely was singing when a friend of mine did ``professional'' recording, and had to know each pitch of a song to perfection, since no overlap was ever sung.
Now was there autotune? dunno. its not like some people who've obviously been tuned. There are some people who are really that good. Michael bauble is one of them
When we finished we got to go watch the sound guys at work. They meticulously gridified and autotuned every note. After it was all over I got the cd, I listened to my favorite tracks that I got to spend the semester playing with my friends, and it had no resemblance to what I knew our group to be. I think I threw the album away.
But what about the non-greatest drummers? The other 99.9% (or higher) of musicians who are tiers below Bonham? Quantization is a net improvement. It takes unlistenable performances and makes them listenable.
https://www.instagram.com/reels/C9h9xpNOoEN/
It's like a non-cook not realising the role of MSG in a dish: despite the lack of awareness, they wouldn't enjoy the dish as much without the MSG
It’s been interesting to notice that Suno-generated tracks have all kinds of subtle tempo drift, and the tempo maps look very similar to the irregularities shown in the article, at least from a numerical perspective. I have actually spent a lot of time quantizing AI-generated tracks to the grid (to aid chopping/editing), even creating automations that do it for me now when I ingest Suno tracks into Ableton for follow-up production work.
Unknown to me whether this is A) an emergent “imperfection” fundamental to the model and its training dataset, or B) something Suno intentionally injects to “humanize” their output, but knowing that low-effort Suno-generated tracks are currently flooding music distributors, I think it’s ironic that the same factor the author describes as exemplifying the very humanity of recorded music may also be one of the biggest tells that a song was AI-generated, for music being released today.
I've also seen produces complain that the default BPM is 120 so they start there and later realize that it should have been changed. Minor annoyance, but it reveals the importance of defaults.
In contrast, when I check out older music from less successful musicians, it's often very imperfect; both in that it's boring, but in that there's little talent there.
Or, to translate: Gridification is modern style that doesn't make up for lack of talent; and ironically masks the talent that used to be there.
Related: I suggest checking out some of the newer Lemon Twigs albums. They're decent songwriters and excellent musicians. They went 100% analog on their most recent album, which I initially thought was a gimmick, until I read this article.
I was thinking about this the other day as I was playing guitar adding slight pauses and swings to what I was playing. The imperfection makes things so much more interesting and fun imo.
I would argue that there's probably a lot more nuance here when you look at how economics of music have changed in the last 50 years - it's now so much cheaper and easier to produce and listen to music. There are millions of bedroom producers experimenting with production techniques, and the market for music is completely saturated with more good music than anyone could possible listen to. Record labels just can't compete when it comes to making interesting, creative music, however they can still win at marketing. I think the modern charts now are less determined by what resonated well with audiences, but rather what has been calculated to be the most 'marketable' kind of music, and I suppose a metronomic tempo is an easier sell in this regard.
Also worth noting: a perfect tempo makes a song a lot easier to remix, which can often gain the song a lot more exposure than the original edit.
Why would losing the ability to play together cause the kick and bass to line up? This is the most forced claudism I've seen in a long time.
Because if they lost the ability to play together, then they would be forced to either overdub tracks played individually with a click track, OR use midi, in both of which cases the kick and bass typically lines up.
So what this say, is we get this exact "perfect line up" now, but not because musicians lost the ability to play together and sound naturally, but because we prefer these other two production techniques and audio processing that removes all natural nuance.
I can only make sense of it as "musicians are so bad at playing together that we don't try". If say the bass player cannot play with others I'm going to record them playing each chord/note in isolation, and then use that as midi samples to track. Do that to everything and you get perfectly lined up music. If you can play together "good enough" then I'm not going to do that.
again these are not exclusive, Even though I fucking hate it, I can drum live to a click track. I hate it because everytime I am slightly off I can fucking hear it like being hit over the head with a frying pan.
I think the thing that has changed is that the tools to "fix" the bugs are better and more commoditized, so they're used more. And similarly, production costs have gone down as hardware is commoditized, so there's more music to choose from. The last piece is that social media has made it popular to all like the same thing and make dance videos to the same songs, so already perfect little pop pieces climb up faster.
Recording "live" can be hard. it requires a bigger studio, more equipment, better engineers and crucially, everyone to be there at the same time.
you can, if you have a click track, record everything separately, and then marry it up later. once you have the drums lined up, you can just replay the tracks you have without the click track.
this means that you can record separately, at different times, in different locations. or if its your bedroom, you can move stuff around to the microphone you have.
But if you record a track as parts, you can then edit it. You want it to sound good right? laptop power has increased significantly, so any plugin can be run in realtime on multiple tracks.
SOme music suits it, others doesn't.
I _love_ the sound of a live band who are playing well. I don't love the sound of a live band who aren't.
Its hard to play together well all the time, so click track gives you a better bang for buck.
What the article is talking about is the teeny tiny imperfections of hitting the notes/drums at the beat (or "grid").
I agree that the imperfections are overfixed to an inhuman level.
Interestingly, there is a "swing" or randomize feature available in some hardware and I guess in every DAW, so if the producers wanted, they would be able to "fix" the notes to a grid, and then add a perfectly calculated random touch to make it sound human.
But yep, for the chorus the offset is definitely deliberate, since it's glaring and repeated every time.
Listening to the lyrics, they're clearly making a heartbeat :)
Social media definitely didn't invent this. I'm not overly familiar with what is popular on social media, but it seems like the internet has greatly expanded the viability of different styles and niche music. When I get together with friends, we all have tons of music than most of us haven't heard before.
"tight" big band music "in the pocket" is deliberately and consistently behind the beat.
Peggy Lee and other great singers are more in tune than auto-tune or any perfectly tuned instrument is. Modern tuning, aka equal temperament, is a compromise. Every key is perfectly identically subtly out of tune. A great singer will sing with natural tuning, adjusted on the fly for each key change. Peggy Lee would sing a third slightly flatter than an auto-tune will. Unless an instrument is also playing the third, in which case she would sing in unison with the instrument.
Most of us aren't Peggy Lee or the incredible studio musicians that came out of New Orleans. We need to learn the rules before we can break them.
Remember, machines don’t kill music, people do—and quantization is one of the main weapons. ... Quantizing everything is the quickest way to suck the life out of a piece of music.
https://docs.native-instruments.com/pdf-guides/Battery_3_Man...
Support your local bands!
With that said, a silver lining of AI learning to imitate mainstream producers is that the (big players of the) music industry may finally lose their grip on people's musical taste. Maybe people will start searching for alternative styles, and going to their (minor artists with a unique voice) performances in person.
I share the belief that this accelerated the rise of Angine de Poitrine, who use microtonal stringed instruments and uncommon time signatures. Both of those things have been around for a while, but never went viral.
But also, a perfected, highly produced sound is part of the aesthetic values of modern popular music. So producers who do it now aren’t necessarily wrong, either. They’re just following taste. If people start loving a loosey goosey White Stripes sound again, producers will go back to leaving it in.
The software had a quantization feature which he showed us how to use but he warned us not to use it on everything, because it makes music sound mechanical and less human. I guess that philosophy did not survive in the music industry.
It was around the same time there was a backlash against the (rather egregious) use of Photoshop in advertising. But for better or worse, in both cases, the use of these and similar tools have become ubiquitous, just in a way that's more subtle.
Nowadays, hearing a band that isn't pitch corrected and quantized to all hell is refreshing, similar to seeing an actor with imperfect teeth. It feels like, for probably a whole host of reasons, almost every art form has been trending toward removing all the imperfections that make human art feel "human" and interesting. I don't expect this will get better now that we have AI.
Where in the binary dichotomy between "you're a real musician who uses human feel/timing to create art" and "you're a hopeless commercial grifter chasing perfection" do I fall?
[1] I hope all musicians feel this way
> Something happened to recorded music over the last twenty-five years that most people can hear, and feel, but almost nobody has the language for.
That is 100% Claude
I literally do not care that someone can "hit high notes" or that "unlike this other artist, my favorite artist can actually sing." I'm listening to music, not grading music class students.
Some artists would gridify recording so people who come to their concerts enjoy their plays with "errors" on purpose.
As humans, we don't want to be seen what we spent our entire life to be considered err'ed. I understand the pitcher perfectness in that regard, though I'd still like unpolished "rock/metal" music.
Now I can only enjoy those raw moments in concerts.
Sure. We would also consider it impossible to achieve in reality, and so the art is in the trying, and gridification removes the art. Hell, it removes the artist.
Not saying this as some kind of general "anti-AI" argument or anything. I'm not advocating for the Butlerian Jihad. I find AI a very useful tool, and I used it at work pretty much every day. But for art, which in a sense is a celebration of human creativity, something gets lost if we use AI to generate it, doesn't it?
I don't really hear the same thing as much in doom, black, or more extreme death variants.
When I hear a drum machine execute with microsecond level precision, I feel like I want to throw my computer through a window. It is instantaneous revulsion. There isn't a ponderous "gee I wonder if this is real/fake" phase of discovery. It's obviously fake and trash. Immediately. Every time.
Orchestral arrangements done the same way might be the only thing that is worse to my ear.
There are situations where having good timing is important, but you cannot put the entire thing on an atomic clock and call it "art".
I hope this was written as tongue in cheek, otherwise wow, you are taking yourself too seriously.
Are electronica and hip hop worse for this? I suppose that's up for debate - but we now have multiple full generations of music listeners and critics who obviously, passionately love those genres, and they've been growing for decades. This is easy to see not just via charts but online discourse and the zeitgeist.
Do those genres 'groove' worse and feel less human? This is more subjective, and more debatable, but I would argue that hip hop has redefined what 'groove' can even mean, with its very off-the-grid, loose feel despite the technically very precise machine looping the beats (because producers nudge each beat off the grid, usually in very intentional ways, or play the beat in live then adjust it). And it's hard to argue that electronic dance music in its many forms hasn't made people move and connect with the music's rhythm in powerful ways, despite almost complete quantization in most dimensions.
I think purely looking at tempo stddev and not much else papers over these aspects a little much.
More specifically, they define gridification as: recording multiple takes, nudging every single note onto the grid for each one, then selecting the best take section by section (however small those sections are) so that every single note is absolutely perfectly on time, in tune etc, loses... something - it removes some of the humanity. The author also explicitly cites many other kinds of recording and editing as NOT gridification - e.g. playing to a click, using a drum machine.
One could say modern music is not "musical performances" then. A sequencer or drum maching playing isn't "a performance", it's a programmed loop.
>Do those genres 'groove' worse and feel less human?
Yes.
When I play the drum machine, I program it live. I never play the same thing twice. It IS a performance. It applies for both vintage drum machines (such as E-mu drumulator or tr808) and new gen ones or grooveboxes (such as Electribes or Octatracks).
That's a timing lock that's tighter than the usual sort in recent generations. There are DAWs (Renoise) that pride themselves on being able to send MIDI with less slop and irregularity (nice trick since MIDI is a serial bus, but you'd think it'd be more common to get right). There are whole genres (see: psytrance) that do very well in trackers which can fire sample-accurate notes simultaneously without resorting to MIDI.
Even though it's of the machine, the groove of an 808/303 pair synced by DINsync is a different beast from 'snap to grid and autotune'. There's subtleties to everything.
The drum machine is not all of the performance. In pop you'll have at the very least a singer. Even if all of the instrumental is machine-made, having a live singer definitely makes it a "performance".
https://musicalform.substack.com/p/why-dance-music-is-not-gr...
They're comparing the tempo deviation not just in the drums but in literally everything.
Billie Eilish may be singing over a drum machine rather than a live drummer but that wouldn't make _her_ perfectly on time.
It is utterly baffling to me that this is a thing someone felt needed expressing. Surely, intuitively knowing this is part of being human?
How else do we explain the blues, love songs... anything?
What I want to know is what the author thinks of drum machines, with their mechanical perfection. Roland's very first product, the TR-77 drum machine, was released in 1972, in time for his 1975 comparison. They have been popular ever since.
Isn't every song recorded as every word singularly at a certain pitch? And timing done completely in the DAW instead of while recording.
Barely was singing when a friend of mine did ``professional'' recording, and had to know each pitch of a song to perfection, since no overlap was ever sung.
Now was there autotune? dunno. its not like some people who've obviously been tuned. There are some people who are really that good. Michael bauble is one of them
What? No? What are you saying?