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.
> 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.
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 either overdub tracks played individually with a click track or use MIDI, in both of which cases the kick and bass would typically line up.
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.
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.
They do. Suno markets itself to artists and producers heavily. Why hire session players when you can use AI? Why have a studio/SE prepare your masters when you can use AI? Feels gross to me, but that’s the pitch.
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.
Amen to that! The difference between overproduced generic 'producer music' and AI music (which is basically a remix of that I guess) is often minimal.
Both are excruciatingly boring.
90% of the music I listen these days is recordings by musicians that I saw live, and bought the CD at their gig. And even then about a quarter of the CD's I buy are misguidedly auto-tuned making the CD very bland compared to their live performance. I much prefer live recordings, where it's much harder to fix a mistake by one of the musicians because everything is audible on all microphones.
On the one hand it's great for (indy) music that you can have the equivalent of e 70s EMI studio in your living room. On the other hand the editing possibilities make people too perfectionist, wringing all personality out of their music.
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 studied 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).
I mean, there's a difference between nudging a few notes right and just running quantize over the entire recording.
> so getting the point of the composition across is my priority. I'll auto-tune and quantize whatever if the composition comes across better.
Which also means you might even move things out of sync/tune if the composition asked for it, right? The point mentioned here is just the trend of lazy fully gridded mixes where the entire song is the exact bpm all the way through and nothing strays off the grid.
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 an IMO sneaky crutch they use to make the food "taste better".
I grew up with songs like the 1975 list (was 5 years old at the time) and recent music has made me feel like it just doesn’t have a “hook” to pull you in or generate real emotion. Technically the modern songs are excellent. But I think it was this gridification I was tapping into.
In addition to the fact everything was just objectively better when you were 5-12 years old.
The entire premise of this essay rests on the idea that musical performances are necessary 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 playing 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
David Byrne was recently on, of all things, Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast:
> History is littered with ideas that have been tossed aside, only for them to gain relevance at some later date. Think of Moby-Dick: forgotten in Melville's time, but now regarded as the great American novel. Or the work of economist Hyman Minsky, which became influential a decade after his death, when the 2008 financial crisis made “the Minsky Moment” a mainstream term. These are just a couple of the things we talk about with the legendary musician David Byrne on today's podcast. Byrne's new book, Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up, looks to categorize numerous “sleeping beauties” — ideas that were lost but then rediscovered. Besides Melville and Minsky, we also talk about the lost Roman recipe for concrete and we get into Byrne's thoughts on how to write a song and his own experience of having his music rediscovered by a new generation.
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.
Totally agree, I just hear none of that kind of music on the radio for the last 20 years.
I think physical drum machines are less what I'm referring to, to me it's more the Pro Tools style DAW that allows us to perfect the life out of music. Yes, counterpoints a plenty, but I stand by it.
> 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.
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.
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.
Perfection is artificial; to err is human. I think people will appreciate these things 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 of 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.
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.
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)
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 just saw Julian Lage a few nights ago here in Seattle - it was so great. I went alone and soaked it in. I'm not even really a jazz fan, but as a lifelong guitarist he is undeniable. He had John Medeski on organ and piano and it was absolutely sublime.
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?
I hadn't heard much Sungazer, though I'm familiar with Adam Neely. Have you heard Knower? Not purely jazz, but superduper tight riffs and the vocals of Genevieve Artadi are ridiculous and catchy, and drummer Louis Cole is outstanding. Sometimes Snarky Puppy is just too damn tight and well-oiled for me to truly appreciate (same with Vulfpeck) but they have some wonderful songs and impressive group interplay.
TBH most of the best jazz/jazz-influenced/-adjacent music coming out in recent years has fully absorbed the "gridification" this thread bemoans, and plays with the tension in the continuum between lockstep and loosey-goosey. TBH what makes ?uestlove unique/influential as a drummer is not his chops or expressiveness, but his ability to sound exactly like a programmed/sampled Dilla beat, and then go on to more human-sounding grooves. Sorry I can't find the link but there are videos of master drummer Nate Smith, whose sense of time is so machine-y tight that he can make a metronome sound like it's off time. Yussef Dayes is another fantastic drummer whose groups have interesting sounds and genuine interplay. Anything involving drummer Chris "Daddy" Dave is worth a listen, too.
I'm impressed with the composition and chops of guitarists Julian Lage and Molly Miller, both of whom know all the fancy theory but prioritize communicating with their fellow musicians and the audience. Not newcomers but guitarists John Scofield, Bill Frisell, and Pat Metheny continually re-invent themselves every few years and have fantastic compositions that aren't just jam vehicles. Everything I've heard from Charlie Hunter since coming out in the '90s, same thing.
TBH I am less impressed by the majority of the latest generation of jazz horn players, can't really say why. Not strictly jazz, but Alabaster dePlume builds on the tradition of "spirit jazz" a la Alice Coltrane or Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra in terms of making sure that everyone in the room, onstage or off, has a real human experience together.
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).
The thing to keep in mind with genres like "Jazz", "Classical", "Rock"... is that they're more useful for organizing a record store than really knowing if music is good, or something that I'll like.
IE, Ella Fitzgerald, Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis all have very different styles.
Personally, when I've listened to "genre" compilations (~20 years ago) or playlists (now,) they have a few songs from artists that I love, and then a lot of decent songs from different artists. But, when I listen to the other artists (who I don't know well) on the compilations, they tend to only have a few good songs or even end up being "one hit wonders."
Anyway, most of the music that I really like tends to borrow heavily from other genres. For example, when I was younger I really liked Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, who borrow heavily from jazz and rearrange classical music as rock. Yet, when I listen to Reach (Jacky Terrason,) some of it sounds like a demo for Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, just waiting to be rearranged for a rock trio with moog overdubs.
> Modern music, and especially modern pop music, is incredibly harmonically simple. You rarely hear anything beyond a 7th chord.
I suspect the same can be said about most "pop" music in the past. (Although I can't pick apart what the chords are just by ear.) When I go back and listen to older "pop" music, a lot of it isn't great. (IE, I poked around Badfinger for a few minutes because Paul McCartney wrote a song for them. They had one hit (Paul's song) and the rest didn't keep my interest. Or I poked around Redbone because Come and Get Your Love was the theme for F is for Family and they also had one hit and the rest didn't keep my interest.)
Or, a different way to put it: Abba, The Beach Boys, and The Beatles were the outliers and many of their contemporaries weren't much better than today's pop artists. I think the difference today is that the great musicians aren't "pop" anymore.
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.
Listen to the first Peppa Pig album and then compare it to one of the more recent ones, maybe the Baby Evie one. The first one I find it hard to get sick of even after my kid's 10th listen. The latter I find insufferable and I only put on one song at a time. Why? The first one sounds organic, the kid singing is far from perfect, and the production is full and rich with some real dynamics in there. The later ones sound more or less AI generated, auto tuned and snapped perfectly to tempo.
Bing Bong Zoo is, dare I say, a slapper. I catch myself humming it. The kids sound like kids. The animals sound like animals. Some words are hard to hear. The accents are alien to me as an American. There's harmonic content. There are loud and soft instruments in the mix. It sounds organic and immersive.
The other thing... I don't even know what that is. It's junk and slop for the ears. It's tiring and flat and un-fun. I don't like my kid listening to it.
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 what? And then the rest… clearly they have a thesis they want to keep harping on, and as someone with musical experience I'm empathetic with what seems to be the main throughline of it, but the Substack as a whole reads as being heavy propaganda for their particular certification, which is a scammy feel.
"we like music in the abstract as a series of numbers" seemed like a nod to AI or quantization general. Now, it might have just been genuine instead of an ironic statement. Also explains an unreadable-to-humans giant table in the middle of the article.
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)
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 73.0 ms ] threadSupport your local bands!
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.
I can only make sense of it as "musicians are so bad at playing together that we don't try". If say the bass player cannot play with others I'm going to record them playing each chord/note in isolation, and then use that as midi samples to track. Do that to everything and you get perfectly lined up music. If you can play together "good enough" then I'm not going to do that.
again these are not exclusive, Even though I fucking hate it, I can drum live to a click track. I hate it because everytime I am slightly off I can fucking hear it like being hit over the head with a frying pan.
Because if they lost the ability to play together, then they either overdub tracks played individually with a click track or use MIDI, in both of which cases the kick and bass would typically 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.
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.
Like, why not just have ChatGPT redub over it at that point.
https://www.instagram.com/reels/C9h9xpNOoEN/
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.
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.
Both are excruciatingly boring.
90% of the music I listen these days is recordings by musicians that I saw live, and bought the CD at their gig. And even then about a quarter of the CD's I buy are misguidedly auto-tuned making the CD very bland compared to their live performance. I much prefer live recordings, where it's much harder to fix a mistake by one of the musicians because everything is audible on all microphones.
On the one hand it's great for (indy) music that you can have the equivalent of e 70s EMI studio in your living room. On the other hand the editing possibilities make people too perfectionist, wringing all personality out of their music.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZ0OSEViyo&t=1m50s
Also similar "HOW WOULD JOHN BONHAM SOUND TODAY? (Quantized)" from 2019:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT4fFolyZYU
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.
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.
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.
To me, the central question is: is this about the composition or the performance? Personally, I studied 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).
> so getting the point of the composition across is my priority. I'll auto-tune and quantize whatever if the composition comes across better.
Which also means you might even move things out of sync/tune if the composition asked for it, right? The point mentioned here is just the trend of lazy fully gridded mixes where the entire song is the exact bpm all the way through and nothing strays off the grid.
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?
A lot of electronic music is also someone sitting on a loop machine and "playing" their samples.
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.
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.
If we're talking street performers, Lucky Chops et co laying it down in Herald Square (NYC); "Funkytown / I Feel Good":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-km8p6rb_EY
* LC's official video, but I don't think the audio is as good as above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da-wrSJaV-E
I’m not saying players have to be metronome-locked like a drum machine. Pulling/pushing the click is fine.
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.
https://youtu.be/p9rVKnEvAQ8?t=240
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
In addition to the fact everything was just objectively better when you were 5-12 years old.
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 playing the beats (because producers nudge each beat off the grid, usually in very intentional ways, or play the beat in live then adjust it). And it's hard to argue that electronic dance music in its many forms hasn't made people move and connect with the music's rhythm in powerful ways, despite almost complete quantization in most dimensions.
I think purely looking at tempo stddev and not much else papers over these aspects a little much.
More specifically, they define gridification as: recording multiple takes, nudging every single note onto the grid for each one, then selecting the best take section by section (however small those sections are) so that every single note is absolutely perfectly on time, in tune etc, loses... something - it removes some of the humanity. The author also explicitly cites many other kinds of recording and editing as NOT gridification - e.g. playing to a click, using a drum machine.
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.
https://musicalform.substack.com/p/why-dance-music-is-not-gr...
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.
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".
When I play the drum machine, I program it live. I never play the same thing twice. It IS a performance. It applies for both vintage drum machines (such as E-mu drumulator or tr808) and new gen ones or grooveboxes (such as Electribes or Octatracks).
That's a timing lock that's tighter than the usual sort in recent generations. There are DAWs (Renoise) that pride themselves on being able to send MIDI with less slop and irregularity (nice trick since MIDI is a serial bus, but you'd think it'd be more common to get right). There are whole genres (see: psytrance) that do very well in trackers which can fire sample-accurate notes simultaneously without resorting to MIDI.
Even though it's of the machine, the groove of an 808/303 pair synced by DINsync is a different beast from 'snap to grid and autotune'. There's subtleties to everything.
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?
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?
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.
Shouldn't modern AI be able to capture that?
I hope this was written as tongue in cheek, otherwise wow, you are taking yourself too seriously.
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.
> History is littered with ideas that have been tossed aside, only for them to gain relevance at some later date. Think of Moby-Dick: forgotten in Melville's time, but now regarded as the great American novel. Or the work of economist Hyman Minsky, which became influential a decade after his death, when the 2008 financial crisis made “the Minsky Moment” a mainstream term. These are just a couple of the things we talk about with the legendary musician David Byrne on today's podcast. Byrne's new book, Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up, looks to categorize numerous “sleeping beauties” — ideas that were lost but then rediscovered. Besides Melville and Minsky, we also talk about the lost Roman recipe for concrete and we get into Byrne's thoughts on how to write a song and his own experience of having his music rediscovered by a new generation.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3x7aZ11WT4
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/david-byrne-explains-h...
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/odd-lots-david-byrne-v1
This is why Angine De Poitrine is vastly more interesting than Tame Impala to me.
I think physical drum machines are less what I'm referring to, to me it's more the Pro Tools style DAW that allows us to perfect the life out of music. Yes, counterpoints a plenty, but I stand by it.
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.
When I hear a drum machine execute with microsecond level precision, I feel like I want to throw my computer through a window. It is instantaneous revulsion. There isn't a ponderous "gee I wonder if this is real/fake" phase of discovery. It's obviously fake and trash. Immediately. Every time.
Orchestral arrangements done the same way might be the only thing that is worse to my ear.
There are situations where having good timing is important, but you cannot put the entire thing on an atomic clock and call it "art".
I don't really hear the same thing as much in doom, black, or more extreme death variants.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZWcbQys6sw
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.
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.
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?
How do you know we haven't?
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.
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.
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 of music. When I get together with friends, we all have tons of music than most of us haven't heard before.
"tight" big band music "in the pocket" is deliberately and consistently behind the beat.
Peggy Lee and other great singers are more in tune than auto-tune or any perfectly tuned instrument is. Modern tuning, aka equal temperament, is a compromise. Every key is perfectly identically subtly out of tune. A great singer will sing with natural tuning, adjusted on the fly for each key change. Peggy Lee would sing a third slightly flatter than an auto-tune will. Unless an instrument is also playing the third, in which case she would sing in unison with the instrument.
Most of us aren't Peggy Lee or the incredible studio musicians that came out of New Orleans. We need to learn the rules before we can break them.
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.
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".
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.
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 always thought T-Pain and Cher did it as a way to help normies hear the autotune that was everywhere in that moment.
In contrast, when I check out older music from less successful musicians, it's often very imperfect; both in that it's boring, but in that there's little talent there.
Or, to translate: Gridification is modern style that doesn't make up for lack of talent; and ironically masks the talent that used to be there.
Related: I suggest checking out some of the newer Lemon Twigs albums. They're decent songwriters and excellent musicians. They went 100% analog on their most recent album, which I initially thought was a gimmick, until I read this article.
I'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.
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.
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.
- 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
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
My classical music friends have unbeknowingly been listening to a lot of AI classical music
I've never heard an AI bebop song come even close to a live example, but I'm always open to being impressed.
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.
TBH most of the best jazz/jazz-influenced/-adjacent music coming out in recent years has fully absorbed the "gridification" this thread bemoans, and plays with the tension in the continuum between lockstep and loosey-goosey. TBH what makes ?uestlove unique/influential as a drummer is not his chops or expressiveness, but his ability to sound exactly like a programmed/sampled Dilla beat, and then go on to more human-sounding grooves. Sorry I can't find the link but there are videos of master drummer Nate Smith, whose sense of time is so machine-y tight that he can make a metronome sound like it's off time. Yussef Dayes is another fantastic drummer whose groups have interesting sounds and genuine interplay. Anything involving drummer Chris "Daddy" Dave is worth a listen, too.
I'm impressed with the composition and chops of guitarists Julian Lage and Molly Miller, both of whom know all the fancy theory but prioritize communicating with their fellow musicians and the audience. Not newcomers but guitarists John Scofield, Bill Frisell, and Pat Metheny continually re-invent themselves every few years and have fantastic compositions that aren't just jam vehicles. Everything I've heard from Charlie Hunter since coming out in the '90s, same thing.
TBH I am less impressed by the majority of the latest generation of jazz horn players, can't really say why. Not strictly jazz, but Alabaster dePlume builds on the tradition of "spirit jazz" a la Alice Coltrane or Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra in terms of making sure that everyone in the room, onstage or off, has a real human experience together.
The thing to keep in mind with genres like "Jazz", "Classical", "Rock"... is that they're more useful for organizing a record store than really knowing if music is good, or something that I'll like.
IE, Ella Fitzgerald, Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis all have very different styles.
Personally, when I've listened to "genre" compilations (~20 years ago) or playlists (now,) they have a few songs from artists that I love, and then a lot of decent songs from different artists. But, when I listen to the other artists (who I don't know well) on the compilations, they tend to only have a few good songs or even end up being "one hit wonders."
Anyway, most of the music that I really like tends to borrow heavily from other genres. For example, when I was younger I really liked Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, who borrow heavily from jazz and rearrange classical music as rock. Yet, when I listen to Reach (Jacky Terrason,) some of it sounds like a demo for Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, just waiting to be rearranged for a rock trio with moog overdubs.
> Modern music, and especially modern pop music, is incredibly harmonically simple. You rarely hear anything beyond a 7th chord.
I suspect the same can be said about most "pop" music in the past. (Although I can't pick apart what the chords are just by ear.) When I go back and listen to older "pop" music, a lot of it isn't great. (IE, I poked around Badfinger for a few minutes because Paul McCartney wrote a song for them. They had one hit (Paul's song) and the rest didn't keep my interest. Or I poked around Redbone because Come and Get Your Love was the theme for F is for Family and they also had one hit and the rest didn't keep my interest.)
Or, a different way to put it: Abba, The Beach Boys, and The Beatles were the outliers and many of their contemporaries weren't much better than today's pop artists. I think the difference today is that the great musicians aren't "pop" anymore.
There's also more niche stuff like Flying Microtonal Banana.
https://www.instagram.com/owencutts
* https://www.instagram.com/owencutts/reel/DejK_APRynG/
old: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGgoHx07sqA new: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM6PQ0cry5c
Bing Bong Zoo is, dare I say, a slapper. I catch myself humming it. The kids sound like kids. The animals sound like animals. Some words are hard to hear. The accents are alien to me as an American. There's harmonic content. There are loud and soft instruments in the mix. It sounds organic and immersive.
The other thing... I don't even know what that is. It's junk and slop for the ears. It's tiring and flat and un-fun. I don't like my kid listening to it.
> 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
Some artists would gridify recording so people who come to their concerts enjoy their plays with "errors" on purpose.
As humans, we don't want to be seen what we spent our entire life to be considered err'ed. I understand the pitcher perfectness in that regard, though I'd still like unpolished "rock/metal" music.
Now I can only enjoy those raw moments in concerts.
Sure. We would also consider it impossible to achieve in reality, and so the art is in the trying, and gridification removes the art. Hell, it removes the artist.
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.