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.
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.
Always appreciated this Beck song, that has what I assume is a programmed drum beat, for having a kick drum strike near the end of the loop that seems deliberately off the beat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvGjG_cmecU
Yeah, especially for a high school band. I'm sure budget was limited and they probably didn't have time for retakes. Playing to a click isn't easy, and playing to backing tracks not perfectly in time with a click is even harder. These are high school kids and professionals will tell you this isn't easy. Given that they probably didn't have time to go through and manually clean things up, you snap it to a grid so it doesn't sound like a mess.
It sounding like a mess is the entire reason it would be valuable. It represents an actual real thing that actually happened at this particular point in your life.
Like, why not just have ChatGPT redub over it at that point.
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.
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.
Not really - gridification of swing usually defines a certain amount of swing and then gridifies to that exact amount - whether it's a pure triplet swing, something heavier, or lighter.
It probably could. Point he's trying to make is that it very often isn't. Lots of pop music is just snapped to grid. Makes it easier to repeat and swap sections.
I'm not sure his demonstration is 'fair', as in someone really quantizing that track would probably do a slightly better job. But it does highlight the effect of over-quantization. Which happens a lot , together with the 'autotune-the-hell-out-of-it' fashion.
Lots of boring music being produced. But , while it wasn't really recorded because recording was expensive, musicians 'phoning it in' have probably always been the majority of popular music.
> Lots of boring music being produced. But , while it wasn't really recorded because recording was expensive, musicians 'phoning it in' have probably always been the majority of popular music.
Which is part of why people revolting against AI generated music is a bit weird to me. So AI music is too far, but so much over produced and changed in the bay is acceptable. It's interesting to me how arbitrary that line is. I abhor the over produced pablum as much as the AI generated stuff equally.
It does happen where drummers are recorded and it's just quantized to 8th notes in the DAW. Simply due to lack of communication between the musician and the producer, or because of some chase of rhythmic perfection. Especially in a lot of modern metal, where you will barely find a swung beat anymore.
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.
>It takes unlistenable performances and makes them listenable.
How is that a good thing?
Humans have limited attention and time, so most of us don't like to waste them on bad things. Human artistic history is suvivorship in practice. The best things rise to the top and are kept, and the worst fall away. This is a natural mechanism that produces a shared culture of good things. When everything is good, nothing is, which is exactly the place we find ourselves now.
Not everybody gets to be an astronaut when they grow up. Our culture celebrates mediocrity because we're afraid of the implications that certain people are naturally better than others. The result is we have no more heroes or aspirations, and computers can fix lack of talent and lack of effort at improvement.
Yeah. If you can’t do something that’s fine. I draw as a hobby but I suck at it. When I see some of the pre-post autotune performances I can’t feel that people are just feeling entitled to a paycheck.
It’s just cheaper. It has nothing to do with it being more listenable. Same with auto tune. It’s cheaper to have some mediocre singer do the track and fix it later. You don’t have to pay the great singer. And if you do get a great singer, you don’t keep them in the studio for as long. It’s just a cost savings. It doesn’t improve the music.
It's cheaper to do what? The thing they're getting for less money is precisely the improved quality or listenability. Their definitions of quality and good enough might be fucked up, but the intent and purpose is clearly to improve it up to some minimal level of quality, otherwise how are they judging a mediocre vs. great singer? How do they know when the great singer is done singing (sang a good enough take), or when they've tweaked the mediocre vocal track enough? The technological interventions change the ratio of cost vs. quality, they don't make quality irrelevant. If they did, you could just record the crappy singer as-is and save even more money.
This post's point is that musical "quality" is not a unidimensional feature and that mechanically optimizing for these "quality" metrics can kill something interesting in music.
Yes I get it, and I'm not replying to the post. I'm replying to the comment that said it was all about saving money and "has nothing to do with it being more listenable." Clearly that can't be true; these producers are trying for some standard of listenability (which I already said could be wrongheaded, to your point). If they weren't, they would not only save money by hiring mediocre talent, they would also save even more money by not doing any post-production interventions at all.
> It’s cheaper to have some mediocre singer do the track and fix it later. You don’t have to pay the great singer. And if you do get a great singer, you don’t keep them in the studio for as long. It’s just a cost savings.
I think you're on to something, but it isn't quite what you think it is.
Corrections are largely a cost issue. But not because singers are so expensive.
The costs being saved are related to the rarity of finding someone who is a great singer at the same time that they're also a great dancer and stunningly attractive. It's much easier to find someone who's an outlier on one dimension than someone who's an outlier on two. If you want someone who is extreme on three dimensions (that you specify in advance), you probably won't be able to find that person at all.
Corrections in production mean that you can achieve something like this:
- Beauty: extreme natural talent, plus help from consultants, stylists, makeup artists, etc
- Dance: about what an average person can achieve through intensive training
- Vocals: extreme machine-supplied talent
at low cost. There are other possible approaches. You could look for a great singer who's willing to have tons of plastic surgery. You could look for a great dancer who's willing to have their singing and physical appearance 'corrected' for a trifecta. I don't actually think either of those would make for a cultural improvement - to the extent that we aren't already doing them - compared to what we have now.
How about a situation where you're recording a song with your buds/bandmates and the drummer played a few notes out-of-time or singer didn't quite sing that long note in tune. You're not going to hire anybody to replace what they did. You can have your buds come back and try and try until they get something to your standard or tell them that they're bad musicians and need to study and practice for more years and years before they dare want to record a song again (purist). Or You can just live with the bad ("shitty is pretty"). Or you could hire someone to come in and replace their parts. Or you could just take a few minutes to fix it in cubase.
To me, the central question is: is this about the composition or the performance? Personally, I spent my university time getting a degree in music composition, so getting the point of the composition across is my priority. I'll auto-tune and quantize whatever if the composition comes across better. But I could understand if other people feel differently (they are a purist or very performance-oriented).
Does it bother you that the drumline consists of two bars recorded on a synthesizer and then repeated over and over again with inhuman, flawless precision for the entire duration of the song?
Recorded on a synthesizer/loop machine by a person imperfectly hitting the pads, then repeated while two humans imperfectly sing and play instruments with the backing drum loop. It's not the same thing at all.
A lot of electronic music is also someone sitting on a loop machine and "playing" their samples.
This is a strange argument. It's not like there was a huge unfulfilled demand for good musicians before quantization / autotune.
I don't think anyone is saying music should all be recorded "raw" without any post-production. The argument is that the workflows used by most big record producers today encourages "sanding away all of the edges" of music, thru quantization, pitch correction, comping etc.
I'd argue that's only one problem (algorithmic music discovery, and how that removes gatekeeping and incentivizes bland "genre" music being a far bigger one). But the two go hand-in-hand. Lower barrier to entry (of "listenability") + lower barrier to distribution = a music landscape dominated by bland, samey bands.
One of my absolute favorite bands is a random street band I stumbled across in New Orleans some years ago, called Yes Ma'am. They had one album at the time, and it is... let's call it "loose". They must have been half in the bag when recording it.
Their subsequent albums got progressively more polished. Still have the street band energy, but they obviously put a lot more effort into the production.
My favorite album BY FAR is the first one. It's just FUN!
You do not need to be the greatest musician to make great music.
Being consistent, playing in time, and executing your parts is baseline competency for any serious player. At least it was. You don’t have to be a great player to attain those abilities.
I’m not saying players have to be metronome-locked like a drum machine. Pulling/pushing the click is fine.
> Quantization is a net improvement. It takes unlistenable performances and makes them listenable.
It also gives musicians a false sense of skill if the producer just gives thumbs up and all they hear back is their own quantized drums. Instead of, you know, practicing and actually nailing the beat.
If all you do is quantize it to the grid, why even bother setting up a drumkit to record. We all know those hits are being sample replaced anyway, might as well just pull up the midi kit.
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!"
I buy that. Long-term salt negative effects of high-quantity of salt are questionable. Restaurant food will make me slug water, hold it, get bloaty, then go on a peeing spree a few hours later. It's a sneaky crutch they use to make the food "taste better".
See also: Using 100% refined flour for everything (That does have a long-term negative health effect not unlike the sugar one you mention), and make their seating uncomfortable to turn tables.
This is partly (or perhaps even rather significantly) due to the relatively new (say, 20-30 years) distributed aspects of music production.
In the 1970s, you began to see the emergence of the drummer "playing to the click" and the main motivation behind this was that some number of the rest of the performers were not in the room and/or not recording at the same time as the drummer. If you let the drummer just do their human thing, the timing will wander a bit in ways that are hard to follow and respond to if you were not in the room. So producers and engineers began to use click tracks to ensure that now matter when/where the differ performers actually recorded their work, everyone would be locked together.
If you record all together in a single space at a single time, you generally don't need this (unless the musicians are not very good and the drummer still wanders a lot).
So it's a phenomenon that didn't begin with DAWs and computers - that technology just took the overall approach even further.
I have some friends who do live shows, and they use a click track - not so much to keep in sync with each other, but to keep in sync with the lights and projections (which are pre-programmed).
It's basically industry standard right now, for shows to be pre-programmed this way. It has some disadvantages, but IMO there are more pros than cons, mainly predictability. (source: I was making the guide tracks)
In my cheesy work-friends jam band, I (the drummer) tried using a click track when we'd record just the drums, and it never went well. I would invariably get frustrated that I wasn't keeping up with it and we'd end up with jagged skippy parts where I was trying to get back on track. I'm sure it was just an experience thing, but ultimately I ended up just recording my part first (sans click track), and the other members just used in-ear monitors of my part while they were recording theirs, and it worked out just fine
Famous studio and touring bassist Lee Sklar has a great youtube channel [1] where he tells war stories and plays along to a few of the thousands of songs he has recorded on over the past 50 years.
In one (which I can't find) he mentions a Japanese musician coming to LA to record with the top LA studio guys. It is very common to play to a click track, and one song just wasn't gelling. The studio guys said, "Let's try it one time without the click track." The Japanese musician said, "We're allowed to do that?" Anyway, they went ahead and the song came to life. The musician literally cried after because it felt so good to not be focused on tracking the click instead of being in the moment making music with a bunch of other humans.
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)
Hell, just throwing in some syncopation into a pop song would make it wildly more interesting.
"Triplet-flow" in rap took the genre by storm after Migos and Future popularized it a while ago, and the initial appeal was the rhythmic novelty of it. (It obviously got stale after the novelty wore off.) Pop music in many of the big genres is in general, however, quite reticent to move away from perfectly riding a 4|4. Even using a 6|8 would be interesting.
There is a decent amount of pop music in 6/8. I always joke that it's like a hack to making a song better because 6/8 is rare enough that it makes the song sound interesting but common enough to not alienate the listener. It ends up sounding mostly like a hard swung 4/4 but then fills and some melodic lines are just a little bit more rhythmically spicy.
I'll take it all a step further: even better if you can find a place to take in some live jazz. Also, on your point about classical: live classical music is also incredibly moving.
While Kansas City isn't necessarily "special" in this regard, it's where I presently call home, and we have an amazing live jazz scene here, and the symphony at Kauffman Center has amazing classical music performances - both of which I cannot stress enough to check out to break apart from the "boring" of the gridified music this essay discussed. Find some live music in whichever locale you're based.
Granted, I'm biased... as I was already jamming out to some jazz when I hit your comment.
There is a level of melodious incoherence with Jazz that I can't get onboard with. I think that's the entire point of it but parts of it start to sound like a Sam Ash music store.
There is definitely some free-jazz that is too much for me as well. But, some of the incoherence is just chromaticism that purposely approaches or plays with our expectations for tension and release.
An incredible player is someone like Chris Potter on the sax ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Fvsz8KuD-g ), who has a truly virtuosic control on tension and release. In the video I linked, he (and everyone in the band too) plays with the ballad form over and over, never seeming to resolve perfectly, until they transform into a wild funk sound that is an ecstatic release that is also just wildly dance-able. The incoherence, even some of the screeching, that emerges is like the cows that are finally let out of the barn after a long winter and jumping for joy in the sun.
idk why this idea is so prevalent. sure theres weird avant-garde jazz, but the vast majority is usually relatively simple "standard" with improv over it.
there is a huge amount of jazz now that is using videogame music as the source material.
like early jazz used popular but older songs and reinterpreted them, knowing the source tune really makes it much easier to get into the overall genre I think. no links handy to help you find it but pick a game you like and search for a jazz cover.
I agree, but I prefer old jazz from before I was born. Modern jazz doesn't appeal to me, it sounds too clean and unoriginal to me (maybe gridification, I don't know, I'm not a musician), with some exceptions. But maybe I didn't find the good modern jazz.
Some good modern jazz I'd recommend (I'm into sax and guitar):
- Chris Potter, I already linked him in another comment but he is a virtuosic post-bop player with incredible improvisational skill. Many people consider him to be one of the best living sax players in that style.
- Shabaka Hutchings, another sax player (he also plays clarinet and flute) with incredible songwriting ability and ability to play over varying genres and styles. It's hard to keep up with all of his projects. A very powerful player and a very gentle player when he chooses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpfpYTmohAk
There are multiple comments in here about contemporary jazz musicians, so I'm gonna pick this one to piggyback on and recommend some more for those who might also be interested. OP says they're into sax and guitar, I've got a general penchant for anyone who messes with "time", so swung/off-kilter rhythms (what's up, J Dilla), syncopation, odd time signatures and so on, but I'll also keep it fairly "normal" in that area for a lot of these...
Robert Glasper, Chris Dave, Derek Hodge & Yasiin Bey, Live @ North Sea Jazz Festival 2019, a really dope combination of contemporary and classic Jazz alongside Hip Hop (Glasper riffing on some Thelonious Monk while trading phrases with Chris Dave as Bey drops some unreleased Black Star is so damn fun)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5QVcYeT74I
I can't comment on classical (I almost only listen to live recordings) but there's a very obvious smoothness, perfection, and lack of surprise, to AI jazz (or as it's often on YT as "chill-jazz") that is immediately apparent to anyone with even a little experience with the genre. Jazz's valorization of improvisation also means there's way more importance put on live recordings and surprise/novelty than on polished recordings which are often considered somewhat suspect even without a whiff of AI.
I've never heard an AI bebop song come even close to a live example, but I'm always open to being impressed.
I love jazz, but my problem with newer stuff is a lot of it feels like the composition is second to the players showing off their chops. Maybe I just listen to bad playlists, but often it will be a 7-8 minute track where everyone takes turns vaguely riffing on the melody. That's cool from a technical perspective, but doesn't interest me compositionally.
Compare that to some of the older stuff like Take 5, Giant Steps, or any of the big band stuff from the 50s. Sure, there was a lot of incredible skill on display, but the music itself didn't seem to take a back seat.
One of my favorite albums of the last couple of years was Against the Fall of Night by Sungazer. Whalefall, the first or second track is probably my favorite song on it - there's still a lot of technical skill, but the composition is also on display. So you get this conversation between the song and soloists, instead of a backing track with a few skilled players. Moon Hooch and Fox Capture Plan are also in this same vein IMO.
So... Any recommendations of newer groups like that? Would love to find more like it.
Didn't know Moon Hooch but made me think a bit of The Comet is Coming, possibly James Brandon Lewis? Fox capture plan are different to, but possibly parallels with Bill Laurance, Aaron Parks, Gogo penguin?
There’s also music outside North America. As an example, South Indian Carnatic has some similarities to jazz but some great divergences (tunings/microtonalty, complex percussion, devotional, etc).
I found that surprisingly many k-pop songs do microtonal shenanigans. Nowhere near most, but it's there. Even something as popular as Boombayah (check the 4th note, it's not an on-tune semitone).
There's also more niche stuff like Flying Microtonal Banana.
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.
I didn't read David Byrne's book but I heard about it on the radio. Doesn't it also mention that drummers started playing with less tempo variation since drum computers are used?
I just looked at my copy... Yes, Chapter 4: How Technology Shapes Music. He also discusses how he decides which "flubs and mistakes" he wanst to fix, remove, replace or keep.
Agree. What is interesting in a band situation is when one human does something another human doesn't expect, whether by accident or just trying something different. This cannot happen with solo artists and laptops.
This is why Angine De Poitrine is vastly more interesting than Tame Impala to me.
To play devil's advocate here, there are plenty of examples where computers (or other kinds of non-human systems) create music in a way which human listeners don't expect. Anyone who's ever played with a drum machine knows you can click a random pattern in and accidentally make something that sounds really good.
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.
> 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.
> 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 :)
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.
>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.
It was an awkward conclusion to this paragraph. When I read it, I assumed it to mean that the kick and bass may intentionally be misaligned (slightly) to make each distinct. (But I have little knowledge of music production.)
>Why would losing the ability to play together cause the kick and bass to line up?
Real musicians playing together will result in the kick and bass not being perfectly aligned. If you can't play with another musician properly then two separate tracks will be perfectly aligned in post production. Is the argument being made.
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.
> 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).
I always thought T-Pain and Cher did it as a way to help normies hear the autotune that was everywhere in that moment.
I just looked up that Shaboozey song on Youtube, because I hadn't heard of it and wondered how different it might sound from usual modern pop. I liked the start of it - not modern-pop-styled at all. Then after a few lines of the verse, the autotune hit me like a brick in the face. Autotune feels like it hurts my ears. It's like nails on a blackboard. I wonder if there's a non-Autotuned live recording of it somewhere - refreshing would be the right word. Probably not though, even live recordings have the life Autotuned out of them.
Donald Fagen is/was well known for doing take after take after take when recording looking for what he found perfect. He would sample notes, replace notes, replace drums and cut and paste until he made the mix he wanted. I was in the music software/hardware industry at the time and the Wendel and Wendel Jr. computers/samplers/drum replacers along with Garfield Doctor Click rhythm controllers were heavily used. I am sure he also did a ton of old school punch in/out and used other mechanisms to get things just the way he wanted.
The point I am trying to make is that the processes that used to take a maniacal amount of time, resources and attention to detail can now be done quickly and automatically. Does Steely Dan's Aja sound better or worse than a modern album produced using modern techniques?
This comes down to taste and who am I to determine what someone else finds appealing in their music? Producers have been "producing" songs and moving them from their originally recorded state into something entirely different for decades.
I personally miss singers being slightly out of tune and beats being slight out of time in songs. I love hearing imperfections in older music. But, would Trevor Horn have pulled some of the singers he produced back into tune before pressing the vinyl? Someone should ask him. I am inclined to say yes.
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’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.
The article doesn't seem to say this specifically, but my take at defining "gridification", in the sense of "why is this term in particular used to refer to the thing they are talking about". The article says "Gridification is when a human performance is treated as error in need of correction and turned into a machine-perfect representation of itself" but they could have used "blorficoration" for this; why "grid"?
Griddification is trying to take each note and align it to a grid, the two axes being time and pitch. All notes (spoken or sung or struck) start aligned and are tonally compatible. In that sense it is like the grid you see on a piano roll describing music. Basically a de-jittered midi-style reduction of the actual music being player.
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.
This is a marketing pitch.
The people behind this article are selling a "Certificate of Embodied Production".
People have been bitching about this since the player piano. In modern popular music, is it a consequence of electronic dance music? That tends to be tightly synchronized, since it comes from clocked devices.
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.
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.
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.
Some people get really disheartened when they see examples of young people with perfect pitch like this, but they really shouldn't. Perfect pitch (or absolute pitch) is one of those things that is obviously incredible on its own, but it's not really necessary to make amazing music. Presumably it might make music making easier, but the idea that perfect pitch destines someone for musical virtuosity is somewhat more a marketing pitch than a thing. Mastery of relative pitch and ear training in the context of songs is, for the most part, far more important. So much so that I'd argue perfect pitch is kind of irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
> 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 until now.
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.
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.
"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.
I dabble in creating mashups from time to time [1] and I see that first hand. One of my first was built around Let's Groove by Earth Wind and Fire. As a funk act, they are as tight as a group of musicians can ever hope to get, and still, the tempo would subtly speed up and down from bar to bar.
It makes things much more challenging to sync up! You can't just speed up the slower song (or vice versa), because even if the averages match, it will still be all over the place from bar to bar. I now have much better workflows to deal with this, but for that first one, I spent a looong time manually adjusting things to get them to fit.
Working with tracks that were recorded to a click (or digitally gridified, as per the article), are much easier to work with. Match the tempos and everything automatically works. Definitely helps creating my mashups...
But I do agree with the post, in that it loses some indescribable human aspect. I love the push and pull of musicians trying to follow each other rather than concentrating on the click. Or even just pushing and pulling against oneself with things like rubato in classical music, sometimes accelerating, and sometimes slowing, at times almost to a dead stop, so as to build a sense of antecip.... pation.
Perhaps the answer to this is to create a model that will instantly apply a sleek, gridified, overproduced sound to music. The sound will lose prestige if it doesn’t take any time or skill and will then fall out of fashion.
Cool read. Would fit nicely into a broader cultural analysis Instrumental Rationality, which I would argue is the upstream cause of this phenomenon as the dominant framework of the world since the industrial revolution.
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.
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 was always scared of people who had studios. Heroes of mine like Photek suddenly became Rupert Parkes in his studio, telling everyone how he did it. The magic got a bit lost.
> So I thought to myself fuckit I’m going to stick to this shitty little computer program, Soundforge. I don’t know any other programs. Once I change something, I can never un-change it. I can only see the waves. So I know when I’m happy with my drums because they look like a nice fishbone. When they look just skeletal as fuck in front of me, and so I know they’ll sound good.
[..]
>> So does that mean your drums are not necessarily in time?
> My drums are definitely not necessarily in time. When I try and do drums that are too regimented, they lose something. But the moment I put drums where I think they sound good, rather than in time, they seem to have that roll, the swing of the jungle and garage tunes I love.
I think that’s definitely part of the sauce that his many imitators are lacking. It’s really hard to find anything that hits that high bar - have you had any success finding other artists releases that measure up? Moderat has a few - rusty nails, versions maybe
Is this arguing that, in order to produce commercially valuable music, all music is conforming to a set of standards, or traits and conform to "a grid"? That's how I read it.
Does this (2019) article propose the opposite? That hit music usually contains a sort of pleasing surprise, and that over time our hits have to become more and more unpredictable musically?
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.
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.
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 prefer keeping the concepts of "playing in time together" and "playing in time together on a strict grid" separate. For example, in a classical orchestra you typically very much strive to play in time together, but you do that according to the conductor's interpretation of the tempo marks of the piece, which often calls for tempo variation.
In jazz, you also typically do your best to play in time together, but for long sections timing is often made an open-ended problem where the rhythm section doesn't interfere too much with stylistic timing variations that IMO often separate the simply skillful solo from the deeply felt one. The idea of an accent in modern popular music seems largely have practically narrowed to dynamic articulation, but agogic accents are a thing that skilled musicians can perform in a band setting without it seeming like an "imperfection".
There's a bit of an artistic treadmill here; I don't know if there's a name for it.
For ages, making painting realistic was the gold standard. An assumed skill for an artist was producing photorealistic art, with composition and light and all of those other characteristics being secondary (though they most likely affected how the art was perceived).
When photography appeared, the ability to render a photorealistic scene was no longer the sole domain of painters; and in fact much of art at that time shifted towards more abstraction.
So too with music and audio; technical perfection was once a prerequisite skill for a musicisian, and now is no longer primary because it can be papered over in the editing booth.
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.
Man in the box by Alice In Chains is a great example of this. The song starts at 105 bpm, then gets 5 bpm faster but then never settles back to exactly 105.
It’s almost amateurish when reading the music, but when you listen to it, it does have a very distinct feel to it.
Funny thing about the Shaboozey song, which I just went & listened to, is that while the tempo might vary humanly, the vocals have been pitch-corrected to within an inch of their life, i.e. the song still sucks.
Yeah it's called quantization. The thing is, though, is when you start producing music you realize heavily quantized music is extremely stale and boring. You have to put in effort by adding "off the grid" details to make it feel alive.
I may be missing something here but most of the 2025 songs sound like they are clearly programmed drums.
Die with a Smile sounds like the exception but I wouldn't discard the idea that those drums were entirely programmed / painted either. It's not like it's difficult to make a flam in a piano roll.
Why not pick from genres that don't predominantly use drum machines as a better comparison?
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.
The objections to MIDI lie in its simplification of musical pitch (which isn't 100% baked into the specification, but does turn out to be overwhelmingly common in actual practice).
This article is mostly about timing, which MIDI doesn't have a huge amount to do with, and the specification doesn't really have any particular problems in this area (it's a series of timestamped events; the resolution of the timestamps is arbitrary, so MIDI can precisely represent incredibly wonky or incredibly precise musical timing).
There are also issues with MIDI 1.0 if you want to provide more performance information on a per-note basis, as happens when playing many instruments. There is an excellent workaround for this with MIDI 1.0 (called MPE - MIDI Polyphonic Expression) but people wanted more and these days MIDI 2.0 mostly provides 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.
Well you’re not just listening to music, you’re also watching a performance. Seeing someone’s fingers on the guitar, touching the keyboard, gripping the drumsticks, watching the expressions on their face and their body posture - none of that adds to the art for you? It’s performance art, and seeing it live gives you something visceral that you can at best imagine or recieve second-hand from a recording.
So yeah I guess a little controversial, haha
Honestly if you’re not into it you’re not into it and that’s fine - but for sure, if you’re going to a concert expecting a pitch-perfect recital of studio-produced tracks, then… you’re kind of just setting yourself up for disappointment. That’s the wrong expectation to go into it with, imo.
> Well you’re not just listening to music, you’re also watching a performance. Seeing someone’s fingers on the guitar, touching the keyboard, gripping the drumsticks, watching the expressions on their face and their body posture - none of that adds to the art for you?
I can see that in a music video. At a live performance, I see a bunch of people in front of me and maybe some distant figures onstage. I definitely can’t see the drummer doing drummer things or anyone’s fingers on a guitar. And some performers just sound like dogshit live.
IMO, live performances are about the atmosphere, which can be hit or miss depending on the performer and the crowd. I’d probably like Rammstein live, but I’d also probably hate the crowd.
A studio recording is also a performance, just not a live one. Movies are similar: we don’t watch “the first take of the day”; we watch the result put together from the best takes.
>At a live performance, I see a bunch of people in front of me and maybe some distant figures onstage. I definitely can’t see the drummer doing drummer things or anyone’s fingers on a guitar.
Go to smaller venues then. I agree that if you go to a 30,000 person concert then you probably aren't going to see anything.
I bet the same is happening with writing, at least with technical and academic. Automated grammar checkers and AI correctors bland the language by enforcing strict grammar. Whereas a slight departure from standard grammar and punctuation is something that could give writing character and personality.
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?
I'm kinda hoping we get a revival of playing music (e.g. at the piano, on the guitar) at home. As Gillian Welch said "If there's something that you want to hear | You can sing it yourself".
Oh, absolutely. Music might be a shit career unless you happen to be in the top 0.01%, but it's a fantastic hobby. Being able to play or sing something yourself is immensely satisfying (maybe not so satisfying to your neighbors, but I digress).
https://imslp.org/ makes an enormous 19th century repertoire of salon music available to the amateur musician. I've been following the YouTube channel Gamma1734 https://www.youtube.com/@PianoScoreVids book marking attractive simple pieces, tagging them "easy piano for me".
I'm slow at learning pieces, bookmarks outnumber learned pieces about a hundred times! This abundance of riches may aid a revival of playing music.
Man, the '75 hit just grabs me from the very first note. The funky rhythm, those fun synthy parps... everything is just so much more compelling, more human, more catchy. Apart from anything else, the Mars-Gaga thing sounds mushy in comparison.
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 between "you're a real musician who uses human feel/timing to create art" OR "you're a hopeless commercial grifter chasing perfection" do I fall?
It's a false dichotomy. Keep making music that you love. If you want to experiment with more free-form timing at some point, that's fine, but don't let online commentary stop you from making your own music.
> 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.
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".
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.
Yeah I'd love to see/hear some examples here; I mostly listen to small-to-mid-level black/doom/trad/power bands and haven't noticed this type of standardization of sound.
It's possible I don't have the ear for it though, so now I wish the article had posted how it made this type of analysis so I could run some of my albums through it myself.
> I wish the article had posted how it made this type of analysis so I could run some of my albums through it myself.
I very simple way is to throw a track into a DAW and see if the drum hits line up perfectly with the "grid". Most DAW's have a grid background so you can see. If it's perfect for the whole song, then it's definitely quantized to death (pun unintended, though does sound quite kvlt).
Ugh, I've just been listening to Gojira the last few days, and now I wonder if they have been using it themselves. Easy for me to dismiss this phenomenon as "that pop music over there". Do you have some examples? Some other impossibly fast metal bands come to mind as well, like Ne Obliviscaris which I explored briefly. I'm a longtime Dream Theater fan, and they've always been very metronomic without assistance, which has sometimes been a criticism of them. They are resistant to outside producers, so I suspect they have not been using "gridification" in the studio. Though, for a stretch before their original drummer returned, they played live to a click track which some portion of fans did not like.
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.
They say perfection is enemy of the good. But in a context of "art", it does not apply. Without striving to achieve such perfection, an art is not an art.
Sure, it wont be achievable to microsecond level but I prop the artists who strive to be perfect (as well as who don't)
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I sometimes go to concerts and sometimes wishes they sing/play like they recorded. Some really suck live, with some diff gig as they cannot pull studio quality performance.
I want to see what I paid for. They can change their plays but still want some solid work.
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e.g. I watched Burton C. Bell (Fear Factory) before he parted his ways. He was good initially but in some live sessions, he was really bad, could not keep his pace, with cracking voices. (he had his reasons for not doing so professionally for his family and legal battles)
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.
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.
>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?
> 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".
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.
If I said music has turned to crap in the last 20 years, some people would say I'm an old man yelling at clouds, and that is probably true. But on the other hand, my teenage kids seem to agree. While they do listen to some modern music, a substantial amount of what they like is older than they are, and a non-trivial amount dates back to the 80s or even before.
I like that as a family we can enjoy a lot of the same music, but it is notably different from how things went when I was a kid.
The whole business of being a producer is to make a product with a moat. The grid and all the current fluff is to signal “production” as a kind of powerful social proof to sell higher margin product.
Auto tune is just a signal that you are a player in the music business the way a distortion pedal used to signal transgressive taste, even though punk was indistinguishable from The Monkees, just performed by hiring cheap drug addicts who couldn’t read contracts.
Do pop musicians have talent, sure, but being a musician and being a recording artist are rarely the same thing.
It is also a completely ridiculous assertion. Most of the music I listen to has almost nothing to do with "forms of felt life becoming publicly perceptible". Some people create music with the goals being shaped by abstract aesthetics that have little or nothing to do with "felt life".
I think it's great to understand that some or even lots of music can be described in a particular way, but I very much doubt that there is any description other than "sound arranged in time and space" that covers all music.
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 modern production calls “correction,” and mistakes for care, is really a form of epistemic violence
I'm so tired of people reaching for the emotional impact of the word "violence" in contexts that are far removed from its actual meaning -- and this context is about the furthest removed I've seen to date.
> If we cannot hear and feel coordinated human time, we cannot learn the forms of felt life that make mutual recognition possible.
I actually laughed out loud.
Remember folks, "punching in" is Okay. Gridifying is Not Okay. Because ________, obviously.
Charitable of him to exclude drum machines, MIDI and so on, which have been quantizing and automating time for 40 years. We've been on a slippery slope that whole time. And to me there's not a lot of difference between recording yourself in the act of conforming to an unvarying mechanical beat (essentially gridifying yourself in real time) vs. fixing it in post.
Someone butthurt enough to downvote the most harmless comments once again I see. Hey I use mechanical timekeeping and beats too, but only as a second-choice substitute for a human drummer. To claim I'm not "gridified" when I do use them is nonsense. The tempo is set, unvarying, and makes no allowances for any spontaneous pushing or pulling of the tempo that any humans in the room might want to do to express something human. If you have a tempo tapper, that helps. Otherwise it's just as much of a strictly gridified tempo as if you went in afterwards and "corrected" it. Oh the numbers will look slightly better because you (humanly) will have trouble landing exactly on every single beat of the mechanical tempo. Instead the effect will show up as an absence of any of those things that were unable to be expressed. Which the listener doesn't even realize they're missing, and which the numbers don't measure. On that note, is this writer not turning directly against his own thesis by saying abstracted numbers are our preferred mode of contemplation? Or by implying that the answer, the truth, is in the numbers? The "data?" But hey what do I know, I've only been making music for 40 years.
> 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 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.
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.
Always appreciated this Beck song, that has what I assume is a programmed drum beat, for having a kick drum strike near the end of the loop that seems deliberately off the beat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvGjG_cmecU
J Dilla was famous for nudging programmed and sampled beats for musical effect. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Dilla_time
Yeah, especially for a high school band. I'm sure budget was limited and they probably didn't have time for retakes. Playing to a click isn't easy, and playing to backing tracks not perfectly in time with a click is even harder. These are high school kids and professionals will tell you this isn't easy. Given that they probably didn't have time to go through and manually clean things up, you snap it to a grid so it doesn't sound like a mess.
It sounding like a mess is the entire reason it would be valuable. It represents an actual real thing that actually happened at this particular point in your life.
Like, why not just have ChatGPT redub over it at that point.
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.
I dont know if there's a longer version of this video, but I looked it up.
https://www.instagram.com/reels/C9h9xpNOoEN/
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.
I think there's a difference between quantization and "gridification" - the latter removes swing too, everything goes to 4:4
Not really - gridification of swing usually defines a certain amount of swing and then gridifies to that exact amount - whether it's a pure triplet swing, something heavier, or lighter.
It probably could. Point he's trying to make is that it very often isn't. Lots of pop music is just snapped to grid. Makes it easier to repeat and swap sections.
I'm not sure his demonstration is 'fair', as in someone really quantizing that track would probably do a slightly better job. But it does highlight the effect of over-quantization. Which happens a lot , together with the 'autotune-the-hell-out-of-it' fashion.
Lots of boring music being produced. But , while it wasn't really recorded because recording was expensive, musicians 'phoning it in' have probably always been the majority of popular music.
> Lots of boring music being produced. But , while it wasn't really recorded because recording was expensive, musicians 'phoning it in' have probably always been the majority of popular music.
Which is part of why people revolting against AI generated music is a bit weird to me. So AI music is too far, but so much over produced and changed in the bay is acceptable. It's interesting to me how arbitrary that line is. I abhor the over produced pablum as much as the AI generated stuff equally.
It does happen where drummers are recorded and it's just quantized to 8th notes in the DAW. Simply due to lack of communication between the musician and the producer, or because of some chase of rhythmic perfection. Especially in a lot of modern metal, where you will barely find a swung beat anymore.
Source is "The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse" from 2024:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZ0OSEViyo&t=1m50s
* Found via transcript search for "fool in the rain": https://filmot.com/search/fool%20in%20the%20rain/1?channelID...
Also similar "HOW WOULD JOHN BONHAM SOUND TODAY? (Quantized)" from 2019:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT4fFolyZYU
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.
>It takes unlistenable performances and makes them listenable.
How is that a good thing?
Humans have limited attention and time, so most of us don't like to waste them on bad things. Human artistic history is suvivorship in practice. The best things rise to the top and are kept, and the worst fall away. This is a natural mechanism that produces a shared culture of good things. When everything is good, nothing is, which is exactly the place we find ourselves now.
Not everybody gets to be an astronaut when they grow up. Our culture celebrates mediocrity because we're afraid of the implications that certain people are naturally better than others. The result is we have no more heroes or aspirations, and computers can fix lack of talent and lack of effort at improvement.
Yeah. If you can’t do something that’s fine. I draw as a hobby but I suck at it. When I see some of the pre-post autotune performances I can’t feel that people are just feeling entitled to a paycheck.
It’s just cheaper. It has nothing to do with it being more listenable. Same with auto tune. It’s cheaper to have some mediocre singer do the track and fix it later. You don’t have to pay the great singer. And if you do get a great singer, you don’t keep them in the studio for as long. It’s just a cost savings. It doesn’t improve the music.
It's cheaper to do what? The thing they're getting for less money is precisely the improved quality or listenability. Their definitions of quality and good enough might be fucked up, but the intent and purpose is clearly to improve it up to some minimal level of quality, otherwise how are they judging a mediocre vs. great singer? How do they know when the great singer is done singing (sang a good enough take), or when they've tweaked the mediocre vocal track enough? The technological interventions change the ratio of cost vs. quality, they don't make quality irrelevant. If they did, you could just record the crappy singer as-is and save even more money.
This post's point is that musical "quality" is not a unidimensional feature and that mechanically optimizing for these "quality" metrics can kill something interesting in music.
Yes I get it, and I'm not replying to the post. I'm replying to the comment that said it was all about saving money and "has nothing to do with it being more listenable." Clearly that can't be true; these producers are trying for some standard of listenability (which I already said could be wrongheaded, to your point). If they weren't, they would not only save money by hiring mediocre talent, they would also save even more money by not doing any post-production interventions at all.
> It’s cheaper to have some mediocre singer do the track and fix it later. You don’t have to pay the great singer. And if you do get a great singer, you don’t keep them in the studio for as long. It’s just a cost savings.
I think you're on to something, but it isn't quite what you think it is.
Corrections are largely a cost issue. But not because singers are so expensive.
The costs being saved are related to the rarity of finding someone who is a great singer at the same time that they're also a great dancer and stunningly attractive. It's much easier to find someone who's an outlier on one dimension than someone who's an outlier on two. If you want someone who is extreme on three dimensions (that you specify in advance), you probably won't be able to find that person at all.
Corrections in production mean that you can achieve something like this:
- Beauty: extreme natural talent, plus help from consultants, stylists, makeup artists, etc
- Dance: about what an average person can achieve through intensive training
- Vocals: extreme machine-supplied talent
at low cost. There are other possible approaches. You could look for a great singer who's willing to have tons of plastic surgery. You could look for a great dancer who's willing to have their singing and physical appearance 'corrected' for a trifecta. I don't actually think either of those would make for a cultural improvement - to the extent that we aren't already doing them - compared to what we have now.
Video Killed the Radio Star.
How about a situation where you're recording a song with your buds/bandmates and the drummer played a few notes out-of-time or singer didn't quite sing that long note in tune. You're not going to hire anybody to replace what they did. You can have your buds come back and try and try until they get something to your standard or tell them that they're bad musicians and need to study and practice for more years and years before they dare want to record a song again (purist). Or You can just live with the bad ("shitty is pretty"). Or you could hire someone to come in and replace their parts. Or you could just take a few minutes to fix it in cubase.
To me, the central question is: is this about the composition or the performance? Personally, I spent my university time getting a degree in music composition, so getting the point of the composition across is my priority. I'll auto-tune and quantize whatever if the composition comes across better. But I could understand if other people feel differently (they are a purist or very performance-oriented).
Music before quantization:
Music after quantization:
Hmm, this “net improvement” of yours seems to have obliterated some important categories. I don’t think I care for it.
Here's a musical performance that I think could be defended as possessing 'soul': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa-FI9exq8o .
Does it bother you that the drumline consists of two bars recorded on a synthesizer and then repeated over and over again with inhuman, flawless precision for the entire duration of the song?
Recorded on a synthesizer/loop machine by a person imperfectly hitting the pads, then repeated while two humans imperfectly sing and play instruments with the backing drum loop. It's not the same thing at all.
A lot of electronic music is also someone sitting on a loop machine and "playing" their samples.
This is a strange argument. It's not like there was a huge unfulfilled demand for good musicians before quantization / autotune.
I don't think anyone is saying music should all be recorded "raw" without any post-production. The argument is that the workflows used by most big record producers today encourages "sanding away all of the edges" of music, thru quantization, pitch correction, comping etc.
I'd argue that's only one problem (algorithmic music discovery, and how that removes gatekeeping and incentivizes bland "genre" music being a far bigger one). But the two go hand-in-hand. Lower barrier to entry (of "listenability") + lower barrier to distribution = a music landscape dominated by bland, samey bands.
One of my absolute favorite bands is a random street band I stumbled across in New Orleans some years ago, called Yes Ma'am. They had one album at the time, and it is... let's call it "loose". They must have been half in the bag when recording it.
Their subsequent albums got progressively more polished. Still have the street band energy, but they obviously put a lot more effort into the production.
My favorite album BY FAR is the first one. It's just FUN!
You do not need to be the greatest musician to make great music.
Being consistent, playing in time, and executing your parts is baseline competency for any serious player. At least it was. You don’t have to be a great player to attain those abilities.
I’m not saying players have to be metronome-locked like a drum machine. Pulling/pushing the click is fine.
> Quantization is a net improvement. It takes unlistenable performances and makes them listenable.
It also gives musicians a false sense of skill if the producer just gives thumbs up and all they hear back is their own quantized drums. Instead of, you know, practicing and actually nailing the beat.
If all you do is quantize it to the grid, why even bother setting up a drumkit to record. We all know those hits are being sample replaced anyway, might as well just pull up the midi kit.
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!"
(Salt isn't as bad for you as the sugar marketing machine wants you to believe.)
I buy that. Long-term salt negative effects of high-quantity of salt are questionable. Restaurant food will make me slug water, hold it, get bloaty, then go on a peeing spree a few hours later. It's a sneaky crutch they use to make the food "taste better".
See also: Using 100% refined flour for everything (That does have a long-term negative health effect not unlike the sugar one you mention), and make their seating uncomfortable to turn tables.
This is partly (or perhaps even rather significantly) due to the relatively new (say, 20-30 years) distributed aspects of music production.
In the 1970s, you began to see the emergence of the drummer "playing to the click" and the main motivation behind this was that some number of the rest of the performers were not in the room and/or not recording at the same time as the drummer. If you let the drummer just do their human thing, the timing will wander a bit in ways that are hard to follow and respond to if you were not in the room. So producers and engineers began to use click tracks to ensure that now matter when/where the differ performers actually recorded their work, everyone would be locked together.
If you record all together in a single space at a single time, you generally don't need this (unless the musicians are not very good and the drummer still wanders a lot).
So it's a phenomenon that didn't begin with DAWs and computers - that technology just took the overall approach even further.
I have some friends who do live shows, and they use a click track - not so much to keep in sync with each other, but to keep in sync with the lights and projections (which are pre-programmed).
It's basically industry standard right now, for shows to be pre-programmed this way. It has some disadvantages, but IMO there are more pros than cons, mainly predictability. (source: I was making the guide tracks)
Right, it’s everywhere, it makes the computers and managers and house happy. It just doesn’t sound good.
In my cheesy work-friends jam band, I (the drummer) tried using a click track when we'd record just the drums, and it never went well. I would invariably get frustrated that I wasn't keeping up with it and we'd end up with jagged skippy parts where I was trying to get back on track. I'm sure it was just an experience thing, but ultimately I ended up just recording my part first (sans click track), and the other members just used in-ear monitors of my part while they were recording theirs, and it worked out just fine
Famous studio and touring bassist Lee Sklar has a great youtube channel [1] where he tells war stories and plays along to a few of the thousands of songs he has recorded on over the past 50 years.
In one (which I can't find) he mentions a Japanese musician coming to LA to record with the top LA studio guys. It is very common to play to a click track, and one song just wasn't gelling. The studio guys said, "Let's try it one time without the click track." The Japanese musician said, "We're allowed to do that?" Anyway, they went ahead and the song came to life. The musician literally cried after because it felt so good to not be focused on tracking the click instead of being in the moment making music with a bunch of other humans.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@lelandsklar6363/videos
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)
also time signatures, most pop music is just 4x4 loops repeating again and again. Jazz is more free form and surprising
Hell, just throwing in some syncopation into a pop song would make it wildly more interesting.
"Triplet-flow" in rap took the genre by storm after Migos and Future popularized it a while ago, and the initial appeal was the rhythmic novelty of it. (It obviously got stale after the novelty wore off.) Pop music in many of the big genres is in general, however, quite reticent to move away from perfectly riding a 4|4. Even using a 6|8 would be interesting.
> Even using a 6|8 would be interesting.
There is a decent amount of pop music in 6/8. I always joke that it's like a hack to making a song better because 6/8 is rare enough that it makes the song sound interesting but common enough to not alienate the listener. It ends up sounding mostly like a hard swung 4/4 but then fills and some melodic lines are just a little bit more rhythmically spicy.
Some examples:
* The Doors - People are Strange
* T. Rex - Hot Love
* Fleetwood Mac - Don't Stop
* Depeche Mode - Personal Jesus
* Marilyn Manson - The Beautiful People
* Green Day - Longview
* Oasis - Lyla
* Blur - Parklife
* Living Things - Bom Bom Bom
* Britney Spears - Womanizer
* Goldfrapp - Strict Machine
* Feist - My Moon My Man
* Gotye - Heart's a Mess
* The Black Keys - Gold on the Ceiling
* Paul Kalkbrenner - The Grouch
Heavy recommendation for jazz, also.
I'll take it all a step further: even better if you can find a place to take in some live jazz. Also, on your point about classical: live classical music is also incredibly moving.
While Kansas City isn't necessarily "special" in this regard, it's where I presently call home, and we have an amazing live jazz scene here, and the symphony at Kauffman Center has amazing classical music performances - both of which I cannot stress enough to check out to break apart from the "boring" of the gridified music this essay discussed. Find some live music in whichever locale you're based.
Granted, I'm biased... as I was already jamming out to some jazz when I hit your comment.
There is a level of melodious incoherence with Jazz that I can't get onboard with. I think that's the entire point of it but parts of it start to sound like a Sam Ash music store.
There is definitely some free-jazz that is too much for me as well. But, some of the incoherence is just chromaticism that purposely approaches or plays with our expectations for tension and release.
An incredible player is someone like Chris Potter on the sax ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Fvsz8KuD-g ), who has a truly virtuosic control on tension and release. In the video I linked, he (and everyone in the band too) plays with the ballad form over and over, never seeming to resolve perfectly, until they transform into a wild funk sound that is an ecstatic release that is also just wildly dance-able. The incoherence, even some of the screeching, that emerges is like the cows that are finally let out of the barn after a long winter and jumping for joy in the sun.
idk why this idea is so prevalent. sure theres weird avant-garde jazz, but the vast majority is usually relatively simple "standard" with improv over it.
there is a huge amount of jazz now that is using videogame music as the source material.
like early jazz used popular but older songs and reinterpreted them, knowing the source tune really makes it much easier to get into the overall genre I think. no links handy to help you find it but pick a game you like and search for a jazz cover.
I agree, but I prefer old jazz from before I was born. Modern jazz doesn't appeal to me, it sounds too clean and unoriginal to me (maybe gridification, I don't know, I'm not a musician), with some exceptions. But maybe I didn't find the good modern jazz.
Some good modern jazz I'd recommend (I'm into sax and guitar):
- Chris Potter, I already linked him in another comment but he is a virtuosic post-bop player with incredible improvisational skill. Many people consider him to be one of the best living sax players in that style.
- Shabaka Hutchings, another sax player (he also plays clarinet and flute) with incredible songwriting ability and ability to play over varying genres and styles. It's hard to keep up with all of his projects. A very powerful player and a very gentle player when he chooses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpfpYTmohAk
- Kamasi Washington makes big band style jazz that mixes old school and modern sounds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8WTPgeVPjg
- Some great guitarists:
- Julian Lage, exists somewhat in an overlap between jazz/classical/blues https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFRVK_1o2cU
- Bill Frisell, no one else sounds like him and his deeply romantic sound https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpu33a_Y8VU
- Mary Holvorsen, she's much more avant garde and loves using whacky pedals for effects but still has incredible chops https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlozC3nHisI
There are multiple comments in here about contemporary jazz musicians, so I'm gonna pick this one to piggyback on and recommend some more for those who might also be interested. OP says they're into sax and guitar, I've got a general penchant for anyone who messes with "time", so swung/off-kilter rhythms (what's up, J Dilla), syncopation, odd time signatures and so on, but I'll also keep it fairly "normal" in that area for a lot of these...
Chris Dave, Marcus King and Cory Henry @ the Blue Note, an absolutely stellar performance from start to finish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woiMRaeimqQ
Pino Palladino, Blake Mills & Same Gendel - Just Wrong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im-Avcv7deE
Pino Palladino, Blake Mills & Chris Dave - Taka https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6s5JavYgE0
Snarky Puppy - Lingus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_XJ_s5IsQc
Robert Glasper, Chris Dave, Derek Hodge & Yasiin Bey, Live @ North Sea Jazz Festival 2019, a really dope combination of contemporary and classic Jazz alongside Hip Hop (Glasper riffing on some Thelonious Monk while trading phrases with Chris Dave as Bey drops some unreleased Black Star is so damn fun) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5QVcYeT74I
R+R=NOW performing Resting Warrior live, time signature is 15/8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmrYWVos0Cs
Nate Smith Live @ Paradiso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pVRd_hproY
Nubya Garcia @ KEXP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7d9T71UWXE
Yussef Dayes - Black Classical Music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPXamHHDfNI
Very cool list, I will give all of these a listen!
Suno and the AI models are actually better at generating jazz and classical music due to the smoothness of the waveforms.
My classical music friends have unbeknowingly been listening to a lot of AI classical music
I can't comment on classical (I almost only listen to live recordings) but there's a very obvious smoothness, perfection, and lack of surprise, to AI jazz (or as it's often on YT as "chill-jazz") that is immediately apparent to anyone with even a little experience with the genre. Jazz's valorization of improvisation also means there's way more importance put on live recordings and surprise/novelty than on polished recordings which are often considered somewhat suspect even without a whiff of AI.
I've never heard an AI bebop song come even close to a live example, but I'm always open to being impressed.
I love jazz, but my problem with newer stuff is a lot of it feels like the composition is second to the players showing off their chops. Maybe I just listen to bad playlists, but often it will be a 7-8 minute track where everyone takes turns vaguely riffing on the melody. That's cool from a technical perspective, but doesn't interest me compositionally.
Compare that to some of the older stuff like Take 5, Giant Steps, or any of the big band stuff from the 50s. Sure, there was a lot of incredible skill on display, but the music itself didn't seem to take a back seat.
One of my favorite albums of the last couple of years was Against the Fall of Night by Sungazer. Whalefall, the first or second track is probably my favorite song on it - there's still a lot of technical skill, but the composition is also on display. So you get this conversation between the song and soloists, instead of a backing track with a few skilled players. Moon Hooch and Fox Capture Plan are also in this same vein IMO.
So... Any recommendations of newer groups like that? Would love to find more like it.
Didn't know Moon Hooch but made me think a bit of The Comet is Coming, possibly James Brandon Lewis? Fox capture plan are different to, but possibly parallels with Bill Laurance, Aaron Parks, Gogo penguin?
There’s also music outside North America. As an example, South Indian Carnatic has some similarities to jazz but some great divergences (tunings/microtonalty, complex percussion, devotional, etc).
I found that surprisingly many k-pop songs do microtonal shenanigans. Nowhere near most, but it's there. Even something as popular as Boombayah (check the 4th note, it's not an on-tune semitone).
There's also more niche stuff like Flying Microtonal Banana.
"New music's cool, but have you ever heard old music?"
https://www.instagram.com/owencutts
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.
I didn't read David Byrne's book but I heard about it on the radio. Doesn't it also mention that drummers started playing with less tempo variation since drum computers are used?
I just looked at my copy... Yes, Chapter 4: How Technology Shapes Music. He also discusses how he decides which "flubs and mistakes" he wanst to fix, remove, replace or keep.
Also the complete death of the band. It's all just solo singer/songwriters which I think leads to lower artistic depth in general.
Agree. What is interesting in a band situation is when one human does something another human doesn't expect, whether by accident or just trying something different. This cannot happen with solo artists and laptops.
This is why Angine De Poitrine is vastly more interesting than Tame Impala to me.
To play devil's advocate here, there are plenty of examples where computers (or other kinds of non-human systems) create music in a way which human listeners don't expect. Anyone who's ever played with a drum machine knows you can click a random pattern in and accidentally make something that sounds really good.
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.
https://docs.native-instruments.com/pdf-guides/Battery_3_Man...
> 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.
> 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 :)
That is a weird phrase.
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.
That's how I read it: "lost the ability to play together" -> "tracks recorded individually to clicks and perfected before mixing".
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.
>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.
It was an awkward conclusion to this paragraph. When I read it, I assumed it to mean that the kick and bass may intentionally be misaligned (slightly) to make each distinct. (But I have little knowledge of music production.)
>Why would losing the ability to play together cause the kick and bass to line up?
Real musicians playing together will result in the kick and bass not being perfectly aligned. If you can't play with another musician properly then two separate tracks will be perfectly aligned in post production. Is the argument being made.
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.
> 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).
I always thought T-Pain and Cher did it as a way to help normies hear the autotune that was everywhere in that moment.
I just looked up that Shaboozey song on Youtube, because I hadn't heard of it and wondered how different it might sound from usual modern pop. I liked the start of it - not modern-pop-styled at all. Then after a few lines of the verse, the autotune hit me like a brick in the face. Autotune feels like it hurts my ears. It's like nails on a blackboard. I wonder if there's a non-Autotuned live recording of it somewhere - refreshing would be the right word. Probably not though, even live recordings have the life Autotuned out of them.
Literally the second measure of the first verse has that characteristic autotune pitch quantization. I guess the instrumental intro was nice, though.
Donald Fagen is/was well known for doing take after take after take when recording looking for what he found perfect. He would sample notes, replace notes, replace drums and cut and paste until he made the mix he wanted. I was in the music software/hardware industry at the time and the Wendel and Wendel Jr. computers/samplers/drum replacers along with Garfield Doctor Click rhythm controllers were heavily used. I am sure he also did a ton of old school punch in/out and used other mechanisms to get things just the way he wanted.
The point I am trying to make is that the processes that used to take a maniacal amount of time, resources and attention to detail can now be done quickly and automatically. Does Steely Dan's Aja sound better or worse than a modern album produced using modern techniques?
This comes down to taste and who am I to determine what someone else finds appealing in their music? Producers have been "producing" songs and moving them from their originally recorded state into something entirely different for decades.
I personally miss singers being slightly out of tune and beats being slight out of time in songs. I love hearing imperfections in older music. But, would Trevor Horn have pulled some of the singers he produced back into tune before pressing the vinyl? Someone should ask him. I am inclined to say yes.
I bet if you ran the analysis for Aja you wouldn’t hear 100% perfect quantization.
Legend was that the title track is all musicians in one room recorded live in a single take.
I posted then deleted some anecdotes I heard at NAMM or AES from Gary Katz thirty years ago, but found this Sound on Sound article about the sessions which is way better than my memory. https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/classic-tracks-steel...
No need to bet. You are right. It wasn’t possible at the time.
> I personally miss singers being slightly out of tune and beats being slight out of time in songs. I love hearing imperfections in older music.
John Bohnam's squeaky base pedal on Physical Graffiti is all I hear and I wouldn't want it any other way.
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.
Support your local bands!
Live music is the best!
Yeah I love the connection with the artist and the crowd you feel with small venues
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.
The article doesn't seem to say this specifically, but my take at defining "gridification", in the sense of "why is this term in particular used to refer to the thing they are talking about". The article says "Gridification is when a human performance is treated as error in need of correction and turned into a machine-perfect representation of itself" but they could have used "blorficoration" for this; why "grid"?
Griddification is trying to take each note and align it to a grid, the two axes being time and pitch. All notes (spoken or sung or struck) start aligned and are tonally compatible. In that sense it is like the grid you see on a piano roll describing music. Basically a de-jittered midi-style reduction of the actual music being player.
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.
This is a marketing pitch. The people behind this article are selling a "Certificate of Embodied Production".
People have been bitching about this since the player piano. In modern popular music, is it a consequence of electronic dance music? That tends to be tightly synchronized, since it comes from clocked devices.
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.
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.
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.
Interestingly, Beato has discussed how his son has perfect pitch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI
Some people get really disheartened when they see examples of young people with perfect pitch like this, but they really shouldn't. Perfect pitch (or absolute pitch) is one of those things that is obviously incredible on its own, but it's not really necessary to make amazing music. Presumably it might make music making easier, but the idea that perfect pitch destines someone for musical virtuosity is somewhat more a marketing pitch than a thing. Mastery of relative pitch and ear training in the context of songs is, for the most part, far more important. So much so that I'd argue perfect pitch is kind of irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
> 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 until now.
An essay against correcting human error, with an uncorrected human error in the title. Feels like the most on-brand typo possible.
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.
Literally the first sentence threw up red flags for me:
> 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
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.
They're selling whatever the "Certificate of Embodied Production" is. You can tell the article veers towards the abstract around there.
"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.
The comma after "hear" reads as non-LLM to me
I dabble in creating mashups from time to time [1] and I see that first hand. One of my first was built around Let's Groove by Earth Wind and Fire. As a funk act, they are as tight as a group of musicians can ever hope to get, and still, the tempo would subtly speed up and down from bar to bar.
It makes things much more challenging to sync up! You can't just speed up the slower song (or vice versa), because even if the averages match, it will still be all over the place from bar to bar. I now have much better workflows to deal with this, but for that first one, I spent a looong time manually adjusting things to get them to fit.
Working with tracks that were recorded to a click (or digitally gridified, as per the article), are much easier to work with. Match the tempos and everything automatically works. Definitely helps creating my mashups...
But I do agree with the post, in that it loses some indescribable human aspect. I love the push and pull of musicians trying to follow each other rather than concentrating on the click. Or even just pushing and pulling against oneself with things like rubato in classical music, sometimes accelerating, and sometimes slowing, at times almost to a dead stop, so as to build a sense of antecip.... pation.
[1] Link if anyone is interested in checking it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP74tMiXBU8&list=PLsj2XVeWwU...
Perhaps the answer to this is to create a model that will instantly apply a sleek, gridified, overproduced sound to music. The sound will lose prestige if it doesn’t take any time or skill and will then fall out of fashion.
Cool read. Would fit nicely into a broader cultural analysis Instrumental Rationality, which I would argue is the upstream cause of this phenomenon as the dominant framework of the world since the industrial revolution.
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.
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 was always scared of people who had studios. Heroes of mine like Photek suddenly became Rupert Parkes in his studio, telling everyone how he did it. The magic got a bit lost.
> So I thought to myself fuckit I’m going to stick to this shitty little computer program, Soundforge. I don’t know any other programs. Once I change something, I can never un-change it. I can only see the waves. So I know when I’m happy with my drums because they look like a nice fishbone. When they look just skeletal as fuck in front of me, and so I know they’ll sound good.
[..]
>> So does that mean your drums are not necessarily in time?
> My drums are definitely not necessarily in time. When I try and do drums that are too regimented, they lose something. But the moment I put drums where I think they sound good, rather than in time, they seem to have that roll, the swing of the jungle and garage tunes I love.
06 https://blackdownsoundboy.blogspot.com/2006/03/soundboy-buri...
I think that’s definitely part of the sauce that his many imitators are lacking. It’s really hard to find anything that hits that high bar - have you had any success finding other artists releases that measure up? Moderat has a few - rusty nails, versions maybe
It's not really in his genre, but the live analog techno wave is definitely reacts well with the topic:
https://brandtbrauerfrick.de/ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8W_4zbiGHA
https://komfortrauschen.net/ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQ3qN2bDSgI
Then there's Jacques - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAdGGLIxrwM
Satelliti: a small Italian band, but very unique sound: dark, psychedelic, electronic rock
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP31BGAmDkI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8epoReNLCo
Bonus track:
Kutiman - Mix Tel Aviv - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izSRjdYln8E
Quantization and DAWs.
Electronic music became pop and pop production now uses all the tools of electronic music.
This is why there are no "bands" anymore and everything is coming from solo producers & vocalists.
Is this arguing that, in order to produce commercially valuable music, all music is conforming to a set of standards, or traits and conform to "a grid"? That's how I read it.
Does this (2019) article propose the opposite? That hit music usually contains a sort of pleasing surprise, and that over time our hits have to become more and more unpredictable musically?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/pop-music-good-br...
That's now I'm reading it. But I'm a music consumer, not a music creator, so I may be missing some nuance or conflating related ideas.
They're calling it gridification but most normies call this quantizing.
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.
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.
In general, there is a subtle imperfection, but only compared to the mechanical precision of the other track. They're clearly not amateurs.
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 :)
It's enough that a machine might snap it to the 16th rather than snapping to the beat. So yeah, maybe not the best example of natural imperfection.
> 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.
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 prefer keeping the concepts of "playing in time together" and "playing in time together on a strict grid" separate. For example, in a classical orchestra you typically very much strive to play in time together, but you do that according to the conductor's interpretation of the tempo marks of the piece, which often calls for tempo variation.
In jazz, you also typically do your best to play in time together, but for long sections timing is often made an open-ended problem where the rhythm section doesn't interfere too much with stylistic timing variations that IMO often separate the simply skillful solo from the deeply felt one. The idea of an accent in modern popular music seems largely have practically narrowed to dynamic articulation, but agogic accents are a thing that skilled musicians can perform in a band setting without it seeming like an "imperfection".
There's a bit of an artistic treadmill here; I don't know if there's a name for it.
For ages, making painting realistic was the gold standard. An assumed skill for an artist was producing photorealistic art, with composition and light and all of those other characteristics being secondary (though they most likely affected how the art was perceived).
When photography appeared, the ability to render a photorealistic scene was no longer the sole domain of painters; and in fact much of art at that time shifted towards more abstraction.
So too with music and audio; technical perfection was once a prerequisite skill for a musicisian, and now is no longer primary because it can be papered over in the editing booth.
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.
Man in the box by Alice In Chains is a great example of this. The song starts at 105 bpm, then gets 5 bpm faster but then never settles back to exactly 105.
It’s almost amateurish when reading the music, but when you listen to it, it does have a very distinct feel to it.
Funny thing about the Shaboozey song, which I just went & listened to, is that while the tempo might vary humanly, the vocals have been pitch-corrected to within an inch of their life, i.e. the song still sucks.
Yeah it's called quantization. The thing is, though, is when you start producing music you realize heavily quantized music is extremely stale and boring. You have to put in effort by adding "off the grid" details to make it feel alive.
I may be missing something here but most of the 2025 songs sound like they are clearly programmed drums.
Die with a Smile sounds like the exception but I wouldn't discard the idea that those drums were entirely programmed / painted either. It's not like it's difficult to make a flam in a piano roll.
Why not pick from genres that don't predominantly use drum machines as a better comparison?
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.
This is not really correct.
The objections to MIDI lie in its simplification of musical pitch (which isn't 100% baked into the specification, but does turn out to be overwhelmingly common in actual practice).
This article is mostly about timing, which MIDI doesn't have a huge amount to do with, and the specification doesn't really have any particular problems in this area (it's a series of timestamped events; the resolution of the timestamps is arbitrary, so MIDI can precisely represent incredibly wonky or incredibly precise musical timing).
There are also issues with MIDI 1.0 if you want to provide more performance information on a per-note basis, as happens when playing many instruments. There is an excellent workaround for this with MIDI 1.0 (called MPE - MIDI Polyphonic Expression) but people wanted more and these days MIDI 2.0 mostly provides 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.
Well you’re not just listening to music, you’re also watching a performance. Seeing someone’s fingers on the guitar, touching the keyboard, gripping the drumsticks, watching the expressions on their face and their body posture - none of that adds to the art for you? It’s performance art, and seeing it live gives you something visceral that you can at best imagine or recieve second-hand from a recording.
So yeah I guess a little controversial, haha
Honestly if you’re not into it you’re not into it and that’s fine - but for sure, if you’re going to a concert expecting a pitch-perfect recital of studio-produced tracks, then… you’re kind of just setting yourself up for disappointment. That’s the wrong expectation to go into it with, imo.
> Well you’re not just listening to music, you’re also watching a performance. Seeing someone’s fingers on the guitar, touching the keyboard, gripping the drumsticks, watching the expressions on their face and their body posture - none of that adds to the art for you?
I can see that in a music video. At a live performance, I see a bunch of people in front of me and maybe some distant figures onstage. I definitely can’t see the drummer doing drummer things or anyone’s fingers on a guitar. And some performers just sound like dogshit live.
IMO, live performances are about the atmosphere, which can be hit or miss depending on the performer and the crowd. I’d probably like Rammstein live, but I’d also probably hate the crowd.
A studio recording is also a performance, just not a live one. Movies are similar: we don’t watch “the first take of the day”; we watch the result put together from the best takes.
>At a live performance, I see a bunch of people in front of me and maybe some distant figures onstage. I definitely can’t see the drummer doing drummer things or anyone’s fingers on a guitar.
Go to smaller venues then. I agree that if you go to a 30,000 person concert then you probably aren't going to see anything.
I bet the same is happening with writing, at least with technical and academic. Automated grammar checkers and AI correctors bland the language by enforcing strict grammar. Whereas a slight departure from standard grammar and punctuation is something that could give writing character and personality.
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?
I'm kinda hoping we get a revival of playing music (e.g. at the piano, on the guitar) at home. As Gillian Welch said "If there's something that you want to hear | You can sing it yourself".
Oh, absolutely. Music might be a shit career unless you happen to be in the top 0.01%, but it's a fantastic hobby. Being able to play or sing something yourself is immensely satisfying (maybe not so satisfying to your neighbors, but I digress).
> a revival of playing music (e.g. at the piano, on the guitar) at home
How do you know we haven't?
https://imslp.org/ makes an enormous 19th century repertoire of salon music available to the amateur musician. I've been following the YouTube channel Gamma1734 https://www.youtube.com/@PianoScoreVids book marking attractive simple pieces, tagging them "easy piano for me".
I'm slow at learning pieces, bookmarks outnumber learned pieces about a hundred times! This abundance of riches may aid a revival of playing music.
Man, the '75 hit just grabs me from the very first note. The funky rhythm, those fun synthy parps... everything is just so much more compelling, more human, more catchy. Apart from anything else, the Mars-Gaga thing sounds mushy in comparison.
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 between "you're a real musician who uses human feel/timing to create art" OR "you're a hopeless commercial grifter chasing perfection" do I fall?
[1] I hope all musicians feel this way
It's a false dichotomy. Keep making music that you love. If you want to experiment with more free-form timing at some point, that's fine, but don't let online commentary stop you from making your own music.
> 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.
It's not just pop music. This plague has infested metal and it's unbearable.
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".
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.
Yeah I'd love to see/hear some examples here; I mostly listen to small-to-mid-level black/doom/trad/power bands and haven't noticed this type of standardization of sound.
It's possible I don't have the ear for it though, so now I wish the article had posted how it made this type of analysis so I could run some of my albums through it myself.
> I wish the article had posted how it made this type of analysis so I could run some of my albums through it myself.
I very simple way is to throw a track into a DAW and see if the drum hits line up perfectly with the "grid". Most DAW's have a grid background so you can see. If it's perfect for the whole song, then it's definitely quantized to death (pun unintended, though does sound quite kvlt).
If I need to visualize a track in a DAW to detect that kind of thing, I probably can't hear it in the first place.
It's everywhere! This Youtube video points out Autotune being used in TikTok videos, which are short enough already to be forgotten immediately.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZWcbQys6sw
Ugh, I've just been listening to Gojira the last few days, and now I wonder if they have been using it themselves. Easy for me to dismiss this phenomenon as "that pop music over there". Do you have some examples? Some other impossibly fast metal bands come to mind as well, like Ne Obliviscaris which I explored briefly. I'm a longtime Dream Theater fan, and they've always been very metronomic without assistance, which has sometimes been a criticism of them. They are resistant to outside producers, so I suspect they have not been using "gridification" in the studio. Though, for a stretch before their original drummer returned, they played live to a click track which some portion of fans did not like.
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.
They say perfection is enemy of the good. But in a context of "art", it does not apply. Without striving to achieve such perfection, an art is not an art.
Sure, it wont be achievable to microsecond level but I prop the artists who strive to be perfect (as well as who don't)
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I sometimes go to concerts and sometimes wishes they sing/play like they recorded. Some really suck live, with some diff gig as they cannot pull studio quality performance.
I want to see what I paid for. They can change their plays but still want some solid work.
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e.g. I watched Burton C. Bell (Fear Factory) before he parted his ways. He was good initially but in some live sessions, he was really bad, could not keep his pace, with cracking voices. (he had his reasons for not doing so professionally for his family and legal battles)
But I want to see and listen what I paid for.
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.
I mean the author specifically called that they weren't talking about that.
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.
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.
Their follow up piece on dance music explains their idea a bit better and how it relates to drum machines and sequencers.
https://musicalform.substack.com/p/why-dance-music-is-not-gr...
>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?
Yes.
> 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".
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.
>Drum machines are instruments. Even if sequenced, drum machines are live instruments and they require skill.
Only if played live via it's pads or hooked to MIDI drum triggers.
If it's sequenced from some computer program like Logic or through step input, then it's not used as a "live instrument".
>I never play the same thing twice
99% of tracks however do. Are we discussing what rarely happens, or what's the most typical case in pop music, what TFA covers?
If I said music has turned to crap in the last 20 years, some people would say I'm an old man yelling at clouds, and that is probably true. But on the other hand, my teenage kids seem to agree. While they do listen to some modern music, a substantial amount of what they like is older than they are, and a non-trivial amount dates back to the 80s or even before.
I like that as a family we can enjoy a lot of the same music, but it is notably different from how things went when I was a kid.
The whole business of being a producer is to make a product with a moat. The grid and all the current fluff is to signal “production” as a kind of powerful social proof to sell higher margin product.
Auto tune is just a signal that you are a player in the music business the way a distortion pedal used to signal transgressive taste, even though punk was indistinguishable from The Monkees, just performed by hiring cheap drug addicts who couldn’t read contracts.
Do pop musicians have talent, sure, but being a musician and being a recording artist are rarely the same thing.
this discussion is missing the concept of microtiming
> It is a presentational symbol through which forms of felt life become publicly perceptible.
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?
It is also a completely ridiculous assertion. Most of the music I listen to has almost nothing to do with "forms of felt life becoming publicly perceptible". Some people create music with the goals being shaped by abstract aesthetics that have little or nothing to do with "felt life".
I think it's great to understand that some or even lots of music can be described in a particular way, but I very much doubt that there is any description other than "sound arranged in time and space" that covers all music.
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 modern production calls “correction,” and mistakes for care, is really a form of epistemic violence
I'm so tired of people reaching for the emotional impact of the word "violence" in contexts that are far removed from its actual meaning -- and this context is about the furthest removed I've seen to date.
> If we cannot hear and feel coordinated human time, we cannot learn the forms of felt life that make mutual recognition possible.
I actually laughed out loud.
Remember folks, "punching in" is Okay. Gridifying is Not Okay. Because ________, obviously.
TLDR: Autotune for tempo is now a thing.
Charitable of him to exclude drum machines, MIDI and so on, which have been quantizing and automating time for 40 years. We've been on a slippery slope that whole time. And to me there's not a lot of difference between recording yourself in the act of conforming to an unvarying mechanical beat (essentially gridifying yourself in real time) vs. fixing it in post.
Someone butthurt enough to downvote the most harmless comments once again I see. Hey I use mechanical timekeeping and beats too, but only as a second-choice substitute for a human drummer. To claim I'm not "gridified" when I do use them is nonsense. The tempo is set, unvarying, and makes no allowances for any spontaneous pushing or pulling of the tempo that any humans in the room might want to do to express something human. If you have a tempo tapper, that helps. Otherwise it's just as much of a strictly gridified tempo as if you went in afterwards and "corrected" it. Oh the numbers will look slightly better because you (humanly) will have trouble landing exactly on every single beat of the mechanical tempo. Instead the effect will show up as an absence of any of those things that were unable to be expressed. Which the listener doesn't even realize they're missing, and which the numbers don't measure. On that note, is this writer not turning directly against his own thesis by saying abstracted numbers are our preferred mode of contemplation? Or by implying that the answer, the truth, is in the numbers? The "data?" But hey what do I know, I've only been making music for 40 years.
> 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.
> Isn't every song recorded as every word singularly at a certain pitch?
What? No? What are you saying?
Bruno has a spectacular range.
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